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Best PCIe Card: Mid-range

Best Graphics Cards For The Money: March 2013
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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.

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    blazorthon , 22 March 2013 06:11
    Is it just me, or did a lot of comments that were even from the current article get cleared?
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    hizodge , 22 March 2013 17:26
    Is there an echo in here?