Best PCI-E Card For £90 (inc VAT): NONE
Yes, the X1950 PRO and 7900 GS are decent cards at the £90 price point. But it is impossible to recommend them with the far more powerful X1950 XT available for a small £15 or so pound price difference.
Best PCI-E Card for £100 (inc VAT):
Radeon X1950 XT
| Radeon X1950 PRO | |
|---|---|
| Codename: | RV570 |
| Process: | 90nm |
| Pixel Shaders: | 36 |
| Vertex Shaders: | 8 |
| Texture Units: | 12 |
| ROPs: | 12 |
| Memory Bus: | 256-bit |
| Core Speed MHz: | 575 |
| Memory Speed MHz: | 690 (1380 effective) |
| DirectX / Shader Model | DX 9.0c / SM 3.0 |
The X1950 XT is a powerful video card. Its core runs a mere 25 MHz slower than that of the X1950 XTX, and its memory runs a full 250 MHz (effective) faster than the X1900 XTX. In plain English, the card is on par with the previous X1900 XTX champ, and fast enough to run at high 1600x1200 with nice eye candy. Yes, it doesn’t sport DirectX 10 abilities, but that doesn’t really matter: the 8600 GTS – which costs a little more – isn’t even in the same performance league as the X1950 XT.
The X1950 XT is an incredible deal at the £100 price point. The next performance tier is almost twice as high at £185, making the X1950 XT a very attractive choice.
Best PCI-E Card for £185 (inc VAT):
GeForce 8800 GTS (320MB version)
| GeForce 8800 GTS (320MB version) | |
|---|---|
| Codename: | G80 |
| Process: | 90nm |
| Universal Shaders: | 96 |
| Texture Units: | 54 |
| ROPs: | 20 |
| Memory Bus: | 320-bit |
| Core Speed MHz: | 500 |
| Memory Speed MHz: | 800 (1600 effective) |
| DirectX / Shader Model | DX 10 / SM 4.0 |
The GeForce 8800 GTS is the little brother of the 8800 GTX, and both are based on the same Nvidia next-generation DirectX 10 GPU. The 8800 GTS is slightly crippled compared to the GTX, but it will still beat powerhouse cards like the dual-GPU 7950 GX2 in many cases. At £185 this card really brings unheard of performance for the price, and at 1600x1200 or below it usually isn’t notably slower than it’s 640MB 8800 GTS cousin that costs almost £40 more.
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X1950 pro can be had for less than £100 OCUK has a x1950 for only £70.49.
I took this from the article
Here are two resources to help you judge if a card is a good buy. The first is the video card hierarchy chart, which groups video cards with similar overall performance into "tiers.” The top tier contains the highest performing cards available, and performance decreases as you go down the tiers from there.
Now it clearly says similar overall performance but that is clearly not the case with this section taken from the chart in the article
X800 XT (& PE), X850 XT (& PE), X1650 XT, X1800 GTO, Mobility X1900, HD 2600 XT
Come on guys to say that the X800XT performs similar to the X1650XT is bordering on criminally misleading similar FPS ok but overall performance?no way!
I have owned both and can say from experience that the X1650XT is a lot better visually and technically can play games the X800s cant so how you can say they are anything like similar is beyond me.
When i first started upgrading cards i wouldnt have known the diff and if i had come and seen the chart and bought a card that cant play up to date games based on it i would have been well upset.
So how about a little disclaimer about different technology's just to give the noobs a heads up
"Best PCI-E Card for £100 (inc VAT):
Radeon X1950 XT"
I can't find a x1950 XT for around £100 anywhere, then the description for it in the article is for the x1950 pro, this is very confusing. Does this mean the recommended £100 card is the XT (which I can't for £100) or the Pro?
So you Tom boys and girls gonna cover the "minor" update to directX10 (10.1) that obsoletes all the DirectX10 cards instead of discussing minor performance differences that wont affect anyone. The question i have is did microsoft lie to the graphics cards builders or did the graphics card builders lie to us ? Surely and upgrade that requires new hardware is a major release not a minor one ? And since vista could never be regarded as "released" until service pack 1 surely any card claiming full Vista compatibility should support DX 10.1.
Instead of just supporting the vendor marketing efforts how about a real news story for once ?
This is what I found at www.ebuyer.com maybe it'll help you in your search.
Gecube X1950XT 256MB GDDR3 AGP Graphics Card
£124.99 Inc. VAT
Gecube X1950Pro 256MB VIVO DVI AGP Graphics Card
£94.99 Inc. VAT
That was with free deliver for anything over £70 or something like that. That is the cheapest I've seem to find at this stage. Anyone else find it for cheaper?