Low-End Graphics - Price Guide, May 2006: Video Cards

Publish date: 2024-05-28

Low-End Graphics

With this video card price guide nearing completion, we will close with a quick look at the budget graphic cards available for purchase. Honestly, the vast majority of users are better off purchasing a midrange card, which in many instances are two or three times as fast as the budget offerings (sometimes more). If you don't intend to play games, you should probably just use whatever graphics card you already have - even integrated graphics is sufficient. As we look at the various products, the reason we make this recommendation should become clear.

Firstly, we have the X1300 cards. For the AGP users out there, most of the X1300s seem a bit overpriced. For that price, you can easily pick up a 6600 GT and get much better performance than an X1300 can deliver. The same goes for the X1300 for PCI-E applications: you can easily pick up an X1600 Pro, 6600 GT, or 7600 GS for about $100, which we would unquestionably suggest you select over an X1300.

There really isn't much we can say here regarding these X300 cards. Any one of these cards should be adequate enough for its application and the only thing we would suggest is you try to stick to about the $50 mark. We see no real need to spend much more than that for a card of this caliber. The real question is why you even need this card in the first place. You can't really play games -- unless you want to play 3-4 year old titles -- with the X300, and if you don't want to play games you might as well hold off upgrading a while longer. About the only reason to purchase a $50 graphics card is if you want a DVI output for an LCD display, since most integrated graphics omit that feature.

Here are the GeForce 7300 GS cards which are meant to replace the 6200 TurboCache cards. We recommend you stick to the lower end of this spectrum as well as the ~$100 midrange cards are a far better choice. Previous tests showed that NVIDIA's 6200 series cards were slightly faster than ATI's X300 cards, while ATI's X1300 comes out ahead of NVIDIA's 7300. Given the poor gaming performance either way, it's mostly a non-issue.

We mentioned DVI outputs as being one reason for a budget graphics card, but of course there are a few others. The HTPC market often prefers a cheap (fanless) graphics card over integrated graphics, due to the improved video decoding quality (AVIVO/PureVideo) and additional connectivity options (component out). Both ATI and NVIDIA have various cards that fit those requirements, if you're interested.

This completes this week's video card guide. We'd like for you to join us again next week, where we'll be taking a look at all your storage needs. Thanks for reading!

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