Best Video card for around $250?

massahwahl

massahwahl

VIP Member
So I bought blazing angels 2 today and my Radeon 2600 pro is struggling at low settings, so its time for an upgrade to a GOOD GPU. What can I get in the $250 range that will last me a while? Im probably heading to best buy to get it, so if you find something on their website it would be best since thats what I would be looking at payin. Thanks!
 
$250 is a little overboard for sure there. For the MSI Radeon HD 2600XT 512mb model run here however I never seem to have any problems running at 1440x900 except for a few old games that see 1280x1024 as the highest and simply use 1152x862 for those.

Since the new lcd here is now widescreen I still have to see how HL2 and other games perform at high settings. But the price on the 2600XT was only $135 last August nowhere near $250. Gee a 3850 could be bought for a PCI-E 2.0 model at that price!
 
The 3870 is about 15% less powerful than the 8800gt. It's a great card, that has little problem playing the newer games, however Newegg has kept the 8800gt in stock, for just $10 more. 15% better performance for $10... you can't beat that.
 
this GPU will play any game an most of them on highest settings with good resiloshion even crysis will play on high settings at like 1280x1024 or so it is only about 7% slower than the 8800GT (G92)(512MB) also fastest ram spped around at the moment i think anyway its ram runs DDR4 2400MHz it is a great card
 
hermeslyre said:
The 3870 is about 15% less powerful than the 8800gt. It's a great card, that has little problem playing the newer games, however Newegg has kept the 8800gt in stock, for just $10 more. 15% better performance for $10... you can't beat that.
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15%, lol. That card gets about 5 fps more on average. The 3870 has proven to give better image quality. Both are great cards.
 
ATI is know for seeing better image quality. That's one of the reasons why I run them here. The gamers prefer NVidia for performance for the most part however while ATI models still should run games at high settings.
 
I've said it before, but I don't really don't have to say it again. Benchmarks say it for me. And I don't really see the image quality claim, there are people who swear both ways. The issue I'm aware of was present in ONE game, so far as I know, and the reasons were esoteric; many people claimed Nvidia purposely screwed up the water texture in Crysis, via the drivers, just to get an FPS gain. Cheating, absolutely. But not conclusive proof that ATI drivers are better in the IQ department than Nvidia's.

They are both great cards, i didn't say otherwise. I just think the 3870 needs to hit it's MSRP more often, or even go lower like the 8800gt has. The 8800gt for $10 more is a better deal, according to everything I've seen. :shrugs:
 
What it actually boils down to is preference between two the two companies making the chips for cards. I went through the ATI/NVidia some time back on an old build where two different NVidia driven cards were replaced by an ATI model at that build. The ATI was a 256mb AGP card while the Asus and later MSI cards were 128mb models then.
 
PC eye said:
What it actually boils down to is preference between two the two companies making the chips for cards. I went through the ATI/NVidia some time back on an old build where two different NVidia driven cards were replaced by an ATI model at that build. The ATI was a 256mb AGP card while the Asus and later MSI cards were 128mb models then.
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I really dont have a preference. I started with a Geforce 7600GS then to my 2600 PRO so ive had both ATI and Nvidia before. They both served their purpose before but I did like Nvidias software a lot more than the ATI software. So I feel better going with the 8800 GT not to mention it seems to get high ratings hands down across the board.
 
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