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Best Video Card For Around $100?
JohnnyMotrin
Member UncommonPosts: 439
in Hardware
I want to upgrade the video card in a machine my kids use and only want to spend around $100. I found this:
and was wondering if this is the best I could do? I've only used NVidia cards in the past so I don't really know how good this Radeon card is. My kids play CoX and will probably be playing SW:TOR when it comes out. Any better suggestions?
Comments
Yes it's the best you'll get for that money, probably the best card under $130/40. It's similar in performance to the 550 ti which is about 30 bucks more expensive.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=86839&CatId=3669
a little more and you can have this.
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The card that you have listed is decent. ATI's are not bad at all; it does at the end of the day come down to personal preference a whole lot. Some people prefer Nvidia while others would be die hard supporters of the ATi series. Personally off late I think the ATI cards are the reason for Nvidia to play catch up with their current line.
Also how old is your rig since you need to see if your CPU can support PCI 2.0, PCI 1.1 can run the cards as well but you might notice a slight kickback on performace at high graphic settings.
Other card that you might want to consider is :
http://stores.tomshardware.com/search_getprod.php?masterid=880635861
Also if you need more information specifically aimed at performance to monetary value for cards you might want to do a little reading at http://www.tomshardware.com .
That's a 6670 which isn't as good as the 6770, hence it being cheaper
You should post the other specs of your computer in case there is bottle necking and you are getting a video card that is too powerful for the computer.
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6790
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681415056490 6 67
$109 with the rebate, and not sure what the free 2 day shipping is.
Looked at Toms and it appears one might expect roughly, 10-15% better performance, over the 6770.
Additionally, if they can discount this card to this price now, Black Monday prices may be even more in your ball park.
Power draw looks to be around 125 watts, while the 6770 is in the 100 watt range, and the 6670 in the mid 50 watts.
If I remember right thats peak power draw, but best to plan for that, and make sure you have the PSU for it.
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But that isn't any better than the card in the original post. It's only more expensive.
Yeah, a 6770 is about the best you're going to get for $100 after rebate, unless you find a really nice deal somewhere.
I appreciate the replies! The rig this card is for has a MSI 870 G45 mobo, AMD Phenom II X2 545, 8GB RAM ddr3-1333, EVGA GTX 460 SE, 500 GB hdd, 650 watt power supply.
This rig has been crashing (blue screen) weather playing an MMO or watching vids on Youtube... I figured there was something wrong with the video card but maybe the 650 watt psu is too low, maybe I should try a 700 watt psu?
It's not about watts, it's about quality.
A 460GTX SE and your CPU could be run just fine on a ~good~ 450W power supply.
Problem is that 90% of the power supplies out there are crap. They label peak power rather than continuous power (like the old stereo debate of RMS versus peak power for speakers)- and some of the more shady units just flat out lie: there have been more than one case where a low power cheap power supply has just had a sticker with a bigger number on it.
It's hard to tell a good power supply from a bad one - you can't just look at it and known. Not even many sites have the equipment to properly test power supplies.
In general, personally, I trust most units by Seasonic and Corsair - but even still I do some research before I buy or recommend any single unit, even if it's from those two brand names.
A Radeon HD 6770 would be a downgrade from the video card you already have. What power supply do you have? A good quality 500 W power supply should be plenty for that system. A mediocre 400 W power supply with a "650 W" sticker on it could easily cause the crashing you're seeing.
Also, what case do you have?
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-performance-radeon-geforce,3018.html
Ignore all of the advice from the forum dwellers and follow this guide.
You really don't need higher than a 650W for the specs you've listed. Quality makes a big difference though, like a previous poster stated. I picked up a nice, highly reviewed (from sites like Tom's Hardware) XFX 650W PSU (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817207002) and never had a problem with my Phenom II X4 955 BE, Radeon HD 6850 overclocked out of the box, 8GB DDR3 1600 RAM, and ASRock 870 Extreme3 motherboard since I built it around a year ago. I know that one is "deactivated" now for some reason, but at least you have something to compare with.
Ah! My power supply is low budget. I bought some brand I never heard of because it lights up blue which fits the color scheme of the rig. I will upgrade the power supply to one of much better quality and see if that fixes the crashes. I had no idea the quality mattered so much. I assumed it was all about the watts.
And to answer a previous question. My tower is a liquid cooled Xion Predator 970. I absolutely LOVE it! The hottest I've ever seen the rig get was 98 degrees farenheit. The CPU is usually 1 degree cooler.
The problem with this 'advice' is the issue might not be the video card. The 460 is a good card, about equal to mine and I can run anything without any issues. It might be defective, but I think you'd be running in to other problems outside of videos and MMOs.
Edit: Disclaimer though, I'm not that knowledgeable about troubleshooting blue screens. I just know what's comparable to my system since I built mine about a year ago and took a couple months to compare everything. My rig can seriously run anything. It's a beast.
The case itself should be all right, but I'd worry a bit about how you've set it up. Liquid cooling setups sometimes do non-standard stuff. If you've got the front fan blowing air in, and the back fan blowing air out across the radiator, it should be fine.
If you get a really bad power supply, stuff like this happens:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTVEtr14FEA
Somewhat milder failures can cause blue screens.
Anyway, either of these are a nice deal:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371030
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139020
The former would be adequate today, but may need to be replaced if you upgrade the system in the future. The latter is pretty nice, and has a lot of headroom for future upgrades.
This reminded me that I did spend a lot of time making sure the cooling was adequate because I knew that could be a problem. I had blue screens several times on my last rig when it overheated just due to poor airflow. Just opening up the side of the case and putting a regular fan on it fixed the problem so the culprit was obvious. For the new one, I used http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129066 for a case, buying a couple fans to fill every fan slot, and http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835103065 for a CPU cooler.
If you're on $100 budget surely it would make sense to make sure it's a faulty PSU causing problems before replacing it only to find it's something else and you've just spent the money. If yuo have a spare rig swap the GPU's over, try one stick of ram at a time, check the CPU and GPU for overheating etc.
Slow down and figure out why it's crashing before you throw money at it.
Update drivers. Clean out dust. Run memtest86+ (or at least Win7's included memtest by hitting F8 at boot). It sounds like you have multiple computers, Swap video cards and see if the system is stable.
If it is the video card you should be able to RMA it.
Oh yes, what wonderful advice.
They recommend a card that is LESS powerful for $100 than what we're recommending. I can totally see why guides like this are SO much better than the advice of "forum dwellers"
From the sound of it, OP, I'd put money on your power supply, and the virtue to addressing that is that even if it's not the source of your crashes, you probably desperately need a better one anyways. Besides, as I said, I'd put money on the PSU being the source of your crashes anyways.
Taking all that was said, I have ordered:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139020&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-RSSDailyDeals-_-na-_-na&AID=10521304&PID=4176333&SID=r9aa38v8xtlj
As said above, i probably need to replace the psu anyway since it was a cheap $25 unit. Thanks for the youtube vid, i definitely don't want anything like that going on in my rig. I will post an update after the psu arrives and I have installed it. I thank you all so much for the replies, you saved me a fortune by not having to spend $200 for geek squad or office depot to tell me it's my psu!