What Is The Best Value Computer You Can Buy?: Part 2

Higher number is better

Continuing on from a fortnight ago, I am going to talk to you about choosing the best value video card for your money.

Basically, when choosing video cards you have two options – ATI (now AMD) or Nvidia. Both of these companies have been making graphics cards for ages and they are good quality. One of the first things you will notice when you go out to buy your chosen cards is the fact that there are several different brands which make the same type of card you want. For example, if you were looking for an Nvidia 9800GT, you might find a Gigabyte 9800GT, an Asus 9800GT or an MSI 9800GT. These cards will often have slight differences but they are made to follow a guideline. they all use exactly the same chip which is made by their respective company (Nvidia or ATI) and then these other companies (Gigabyte, Asus etc.) make the video card and put the chip inside it. Sometimes you might get some factory overclocked cards which give better performance than the reference design. Others might give better coolers or silent coolers. It is all up to you. It is probably better to stick to a brand you trust as there have been problems such as failing fans on graphics cards from lesser known brands, but they are still good.

If you are buying a card today, you are most likely interested in a DirectX 11 card, the latest version for the latest games which adds a few new features such as tessellation to make games look  even better. With this, you now have the choice of Nvidia’s Fermi chips and the ATI 5xxx series. Both of these cards can get blazing fast but one of the shortcomings of the Fermi is that it runs very hot and uses a LOT of power so you need a serious power supply for some of the higher end card. Obviously, if you want to go crazy, you can get the top of the line card which costs well over AU$1000. Typically though, when looking at price to performance ratio, the ATI cards have the best value. You can get cards for $250 which will play all the latest games on high settings at decent frame rates. What more could you ask for?

The best value ATI card currently is the 5770 which costs around AU$250 and will handle just about anything you throw at it. It is a perfect mid-range graphics card and should satisfy most users. Of course, if you must have Nvidia then an excellent card is the GTX460 which costs only a little bit more than the 5770. It can however outperform the 5770 by quite a fair margin and easily justifies the small price premium. If your budget can stretch that far then I would recommend getting the GTX460. It comes to around $270 with 768MB of RAM compared to the ATI’s 1GB.

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