Tom's Hardware > All Reviews > Components > Graphics Cards > Best Graphics Cards For The Money: Feb. '09

Best PCIe Card: $50 To $85

07:10 - Monday 16 February 2009 by Don Woligroski

Best PCIe Card For ~$60:

Good 1440x900 performance in most games

Radeon HD 4650
Codename:	RV730
Process:	55 nm
Universal Shaders:	320
Texture Units:	32
Raster-Operation Processors (ROPs):	8
Memory Bus:	128-bit
Core Speed MHz:	600
Memory Speed MHz:	500 (1,000 effective)
DirectX/Shader Model:	DX 10.1/SM 4.0

Read Customer Reviews of HIS' Hightech H465FS512P

The Radeon HD 4650 is a really attractive budget-gaming option that takes us past the old 1280x1024 limitation. The card is simply an underclocked Radeon HD 4670, which by now has a reputation as a very fast mainstream card with low-power requirements. Well, the HD 4650 requires even less power and offers very good gaming performance for the price.

The HD 4650 is also an exemplary choice for a home-theater PC (HTPC) because it can even accelerate HD video without breaking a sweat, and since it’s a single-slot solution, the card won’t use up too much space in your HTPC.

The 4650 has recently enjoyed a price drop and now retails for $60—at that price, this card is a fantastic gaming baseline and it'll run just about anything out there at 1280x1024.

Best PCI Express (PCIe) Card For $65-$85: None

Choosing to forgo this entire price segment is bound to be a controversial decision, so some explanation is in order.

This price segment holds three excellent performers: the GeForce 9600 GSO, the Radeon HD 4670, the Radeon HD 3850, and the GeForce 9600 GT. The GeForce 9600 GT is a particularly great card now found at an $85 price point. So, why can't we recommend them?

Here is our reasoning: the Radeon HD 3850, the GeForce 9600 GSO, and the Radeon HD 4670 can be found for about $80. At this price they're an excellent deal, but for $5 more you could purchase a GeForce 9600 GT that would offer a great deal of improvement and would thus make it difficult to recommend the $80 cards.

However, recommending a GeForce 9600 GT is impossible when the Radeon HD 4830 can be found for less than $5 more.

The bottom dropping out of Radeon HD 4830 prices is unexpected and represents a huge boon for the gamer without a lot of cash. So we've chosen to recommend that buyers either save as much money as possible and go with the Radeon HD 4650 or pay the extra $30 for a serious performance boost and get the Radeon HD 4830.