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We’re constantly on the hunt for top-shelf PC performance—you’re not reading Bottom-Feeder PC, after all. When rendering our review verdicts, we do factor in price, but recommending a subpar product just because it’s cheap is sacrilege to us. Pricing can be relevant, but when it comes to videocards, we typically anchor our opinions on the toughest criteria we know of: 3D performance in the most demanding games on the market, at resolutions of 1920x1200 and higher and with all eye candy enabled.
While our editorial mantra might best be expressed as “better, faster, stronger” (hey, we should do a cover story on that!), there’s no escaping the fact that the videocard market boasts a broad spectrum of inexpensive—and intriguing—alternatives. In fact, as AMD and Nvidia have been battling for supremacy at the top of the market, we’ve watched the entry points for penultimate-performance videocards gradually but consistently come down to earth. Sure, playing Crysis on a 30-inch panel might be out of the question if you’re running one of the lower-priced cards, but we still wanted to discover the 3D tipping point—the point at which you’re better off giving up PC gaming altogether because the card you’re running is horribly, utterly lacking in horsepower.
To hack our way through the 3D puzzle, we assembled a field of six videocards, ranging in price from less than $100 to a maximum of $250. We asked AMD and Nvidia to pick three of their best third-party representatives within this spectrum, but it must be noted that we’re not pitting the two companies against one another. This article is not an AMD versus Nvidia cage match. In a nutshell, we wanted to know how little you could spend before your 3D firepower became woefully incapable, and for this reason we’ll be presenting our six reviews in street-price order, from lowest to highest.
In our book, an acceptable gaming card must be capable of running Far Cry 2 and Crysis at 60 frames per second with a resolution of 1680x1050. Anything short of this performance metric falls below our basic expectations (though for these two games we are willing to sacrifice antialiasing and some other high-end features). Similarly, an acceptable card must be able to play Call of Duty 4 at 60fps at that same 1680x1050 resolution with 4x antialiasing.
Nonetheless, all “frame rate is king” posturing aside, we’re also of the opinion that you don’t necessarily have to be a hardcore gamer to be a PC enthusiast, so we also examined each budget card’s feature set to evaluate its home-theater capabilities. And after taking price, performance, and feature set into consideration, we awarded a pass-or-fail rating to each card—this in addition to our usual numeric verdict. Bottom line: If a card receives a fail mark, it’s not worth your money, no matter how cheap it sells for.
So, PC enthusiasts don’t have to be gamers, but can they be skinflints? Let’s find out.
Comments are closed on this article
maniacm0nk3y
July 23, 2009 at 11:20pm
All these are great cards. I personally have the eVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 (I wish nVidia kept with the simpler monikers...), Superclocked. MicroCenter was a hidden gem I discovered while building my Core i7 rig. Everything works fine, and as a surprise mine included a free download of 3DMark Vantage (full retail).
This could help a lot of people.
Stever
July 23, 2009 at 7:41am
I can't seem to get to the 260 review page (7/23/09 @ 9:40am gmt-6). On the main page the graphic doesn't link anywhere. Clicking the text link on any other card page takes me to a page that says "You are not authorized to access this page."
Hope this helps!
DOOMHAMMA
July 23, 2009 at 7:43am
That is because they posted the same text for the 9800 and the 260 last night. I posted on the 260 link, and they have since taken it down. It'll appear soon, no doubt.
vulchan
July 22, 2009 at 10:53pm
I just saw a sub 200 dollar 4890 on newegg today, that would seem like the best choice for budget pc gamers right now imo.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150359
jihnn
July 23, 2009 at 5:53am
as always with maxpc reviews you actually need to do your own research they get close but they are only a partial guide as to what is available
always look at the atrical date. then check other sources before you spend your hard earned dollars
Righteous Fury
July 23, 2009 at 11:16am
if you do look at the date, it is today. Also, I'd like to point out that what they paid for the 4850, I can pick up a 4870 for... so, how long ago did they do this review?
silversov
July 22, 2009 at 10:37pm
the_crowbar your a fag noone cares. Look at the bench marks fuck the rest. good article.
Righteous Fury
July 23, 2009 at 11:18am
there are already enough ass-hats in this world, please don't add to the population. Thx!
the_crowbar
July 22, 2009 at 9:29pm
All right, first off, great article idea! But, you botched some areas. There is a MAJOR cut-n-paste error with the reviews for the 9800gt and gtx 260. The review portion of each is identical, each applying to the 9800gt. Also, you already reviewed at least some of these cards, so why write seperate reviews for a single article? It just makes the entire thing a little harder to navigate. Maybe a description of each card with pros and cons (like in a regular review) and then a summary, where you pick a favorite or two, would have been better. You gave the gtx 260 a 7 verdict, even though back in janurary you gave it a 9. I know it's aged a little, but it's also come down in price quite a bit. Again, reviewing something six months after release and giving it a lower score just seems a little weird. And what settings were you running Crysis at? Very High? I don't think so, so it would be worth mentioning that you've got it running at high/dx9, assuming you did lower the settings. Anyway, I liked the article, it was just kind of difficult to navigate.
