Low-End Cards Offer Strong Performance
These boards will satisfy budget-minded gamers and other users.
You won't obtain killer frame rates, big software bundles, or lots of extras, but today's leading value-priced graphics boards offer strong performance for bargain hunters and casual gamers who want to upgrade PCI Express--based desktops.
Our top three cards, PNY's GeForce 6600 GT, XFX's GeForce 6600, and Asus's EAX1600Pro compete well with mainstream cards we've tested that cost up to $100 more, so long as the competition is running at a midlevel resolution such as 1024 by 768.
That isn't terribly surprising in the case of the PNY card, which moved from our mainstream category (cards priced from $150 to $300) to our value category (cards priced below $150) after a price cut. It's worth noting that PNY's card has only 128MB of memory--but that's DDR3 RAM, not the slower DDR2 and DDR RAM that you'll find on competing cards. The advantage of the faster RAM became obvious in tests by the PC World Test Center, which showed this card to be extremely competitive with other cards in its class that had twice as much on-board memory.
Our number two card, the XFX GeForce 6600, is a bit less expensive than the PNY, but it matched up very well on pure performance measures. You will have to buy your own composite and component cables if you want to output video to a monitor equipped with those inputs, but that's a relatively minor shortcoming.
Both the Asus EAX1600Pro and the MSI GeForce NX6600 offer solid performance, excellent cooling systems, and a number of pretty good extras (Asus offers a decent games bundle; MSI, an excellent video adapter cable). Both are a performance level below the PNY and XFX cards, however.
EVGA's value card offering, the eGeForce 6600, has the lowest street price ($110) of any top contender, but its performance in our test suite was underwhelming, and it lacked a software bundle.
Sapphire's Radeon X1300 failed to make the chart. Terrifically priced at about $85, the card also comes with excellent cabling accessories, but its performance test scores were consistently below par.
Click the links below for the latest online value graphics boards rankings or a comprehensive list of all value graphics boards we've tested.
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Ramon G. McLeod
