Best PCIe Card For ~£140:
Radeon HD 7850 2 GB
Excellent 1920x1200 performance, Good 2560x1600 performance in most games with lowered detail
| Radeon HD 7850 | |
|---|---|
| Codename: | Pitcairn |
| Process: | 28 nm |
| Unified Shaders: | 1,024 |
| Texture Units: | 64 |
| ROPs: | 32 |
| Memory Bus: | 256-bit |
| Core Speed MHz: | 860 |
| Memory Speed MHz: | 1,200 (4,800 effective) |
| DirectX/Shader Model: | DX 11.1/SM 5 |
| Max TDP: | 130 W |
You might not need the extra gigabyte of memory that spending that £15 buys. But, in the event that you want to run a higher resolution than 1920x1080, increase detail quality, or apply some anti-aliasing, it could be what keeps your performance scaling as expected, rather than falling off a cliff.
Read our full review of AMD's Radeon HD 7800 series for more information on the card and its accompanying architecture.
Best PCIe Card For ~£200:
Radeon HD 7870 (Tahiti LE)
Excellent 1920x1200 performance, Good 2560x1600 performance in most games with lowered detail
| Radeon HD 7870 (Tahiti LE) | |
|---|---|
| Codename: | Tahiti LE |
| Process: | 28 nm |
| Unified Shaders: | 1,536 |
| Texture Units: | 96 |
| ROPs: | 32 |
| Memory Bus: | 256-bit |
| Core Speed/Boost MHz: | 925/975 |
| Memory Speed MHz: | 1,500 (6,000 effective) |
| DirectX/Shader Model: | DX 11.1/SM 5 |
| Max TDP: | 200 W |
Although these cards bear the Radeon HD 7870 model designation, a number of 7870s are floating around with handicapped Tahiti GPUs, rather than the Pitcairn graphics processor you'd expect. We recently took a look at this derivative's potential in Tahiti LE, Tested: PowerColor's HD7870 PCS+ Myst Edition, and are therefore confident replacing the Pitcairn-based 7870 with this card as our sole recommendation at £200.
Create a new thread in the UK Article comments forum about this subject
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0 Hideblazorthon , 22 March 2013 06:11Is it just me, or did a lot of comments that were even from the current article get cleared?
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0 Hidehizodge , 22 March 2013 17:26Is there an echo in here?