Related articles

• It's rather difficult to pick the perfect graphics card at a certain price point, because this probably is the fastest-changing segment of the hardware market. We looked at our Interactive Desktop VGA Charts (2007 Edition) to find a suitable graphics card. The charts offer great comparisons of most of the current- and last-generation graphics card models, based on objective benchmarks. For each graphics chip and memory device, you will find multiple vendors. Right now, an ATI/AMD Radeon HD 2600 or Nvidia's GeForce 8600 series are the mainstream workhorses for 3D graphics. As you can see in our VGA Charts, both cards offer mainstream performance at very acceptable prices. There might still be Radeon X1800 or X1900 cards, or GeForce 7800 and 7900 parts available for equally interesting prices. However, they will consume considerably more energy and they aren't DirectX 10 compliant. While this isn't a real issue today, it will be with upcoming 3D game titles. We recommend going for a reasonable DirectX10 graphics card and then upgrade to something with more bang later on. Graphics performance will speed up the pace faster than most other components. We chose Gigabyte's Radeon HD 2600 Pro. It has 256 MB GDDR2 memory running at 800 MHz, a 600 MHz chip clock speed and dual-DVI interfaces. You can always convert DVI interfaces to attach an analog S-Sub display, but you will be thankful to get two DVI ports if you ever want to hook up two TFT displays. Lastly, this graphics card requires little idle power and is passively cooled, which is important if you want the system to be quiet and energy efficient. Make sure your case is properly ventilated to ensure stable operation. If you cannot or if you live in a really hot environment, we recommend investing in a graphics card that has a fan.

• AMD Radeon HD 3800: ATI Strikes Back

  Things aren't looking too good for AMD. Up until now, its graphic card offerings were only worthwhile for two cards: the Radeon HD 2900 XT Compare Prices on Radeon HD 2900 XT, performing better than the GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB at a similar price (but at a noise and power consumption level much higher at peak) and maybe the Radeon HD 2600 XT, but only for Home Theater amateurs. Here may have been a big gap between those two cards, but their respective price points were almost coherent. The manufacturer was ready to fill it up with its Radeon HD 3850 and 3870, which only launches today. At least, this was true until, all of a sudden, its best friend knocked the air out of it by launching a card that surprised everyone, NVIDIA included: the GeForce 8800 GT 512 MB with a performance-price ratio that's actually exceptional. Call of Duty 4 The situation thus becomes particularly ironic today because, AMD's very high end is thus beaten by a card sold at $230 . It's a situation that has a tendency to remind us of a time we thought was forgotten, that of the first Radeon. Yet, the rushed launch of GeForce 8800 GT is characterized by a more than problematic availability of those cards, and it's going to remain tight until January. Henceforth, what is AMD able to offer in this price range for the end of the year? Join our discussion on this article!

• Despite this botched launch, where the Radeon HD 4850 was available even before the press had information about it and the 4870 is still not available, there’s no denying that the 4850 is a very good card. Its performance is only 19% below the GeForce 260 GTX’ and is overall on a par with the GeForce 9800 GTX +, while beating out the 3870 X2! Note that those figures are influenced by the slight factory overclocking of the Asus model tested for this article, but on the other hand they’re adversely affected by the absence of Race Driver: GRID due to the problems we had with our sample card. Still, the 4850 is already available at a price even lower than expected: $200! Nvidia should be the first to be surprised by that, while their decision to send us a GeForce 9800 GTX + a month before its availability (thus causing a big drop in the GeForce 9800 GTX’ price with some stores are starting to offer it for $199 ), won’t be enough. The GeForce 9800 GTX +, though not uninteresting (since it uses Nvidia’s first 55 µm GPU, with a frequency increased by 9% and a slight drop in power consumption and temperature), only represents a slight improvement in performance compared to the 9800 GTX and it costs more (it’s expected to retail in the neighborhood of $230, with the 9800 GTX’ price dropping a little more in the meantime), and above all it’s not yet available. As of now, in any event, it doesn’t seem to be worth the additional wait, prior to publication of our results of the high-end Radeon HD 4870. AMD Radeon HD 4850A too-hasty launch, but a card with a red-hot performance/price ratio despite its use of a reworked architecture, now optimized and extremely effective at this price level. Despite its advance in presenting the GeForce 9800 GTX +, Nvidia has been bested for performance/price ratio and at this price level.ProsConsOptimized and corrected RV670 architecturePerformance on a par or slightly better than the GeForce 9800 GTX +Antialiasing often performs better than GeForceHigher power use and temperature at idle + AWARD: The Tom’s Hardware Recommended Buy Award, given to a product that provides the best bang for the buck.