Top 5 Budget PC Graphics Cards

It has taken a while, but NVIDIA has finally released a response product to the Radeon HD 3000 series cards. The new 9600 GT is aimed more at the budget to mid-stream use but offers very strong performance for the price point. The eVGA e-GeForce 9600 GT KO isn't the fastest version on the market, but it certainly is the fastest available for under $200 at launch. eVGA has boosted the base clock speed up to 700MHz and the 512MB of memory to 1900MHz. This gives it very strong performance. The new card also uses the PCI-Express 2.0 and SLI compatible. The card is also only a single slot width which can help for those with desktops that have limited internal space.

With the release of the new Radeon 9600 graphics cards, prices of the Radeon HD 3870 cards have dropped to remain competitive. The HD 3870 started out as a more high end processor, but now falls within the budget categories because of the price cuts. Its performance is still quite strong and can even outperform the 9600 GT in some applications. The card does support the new Direct X 10.1 graphics that the GeForce 9600 still does not even though it has not been used in any applications yet. It also supports the new PCI-Express 2.0 standard. It is possible to use multiple cards for improved performance with ATI's CrossFire as well. The card does use a two slot design that requires additional space.

The prices on the ATI Radeon HD 3850 cards has not dropped as dramatically as the HD 3870 based cards, but they have gone down somewhat. The ASUS Radeon HD 3850 is fairly well priced but uses a 256MB layout. This helps reduce the costs significantly but does reduce the higher resolution performance, particularly if using filters. It still has the performance to run most games well even at moderately high resolutions. Just like the HD 3870, it supports Direct X 10.1, PCI-Express 2.0 and support for CrossFire configurations. One big advantage that the card has over the HD 3870 designs though is its single slot size. This is great for those that have more limited space within their computer case.

Many graphics cards are now clocked at higher frequencies than the reference board designs from NVIDIA and ATI. BFG Technologies is one of those companies that made a business by overclocking. The GeForce 8600 GTS OC is one such card that increases the clock frequency to 720MHz over the standard 675 and the memory to 1566MHz over the stock 1450. This gives the aging graphics processor a bit of a performance boost over the standard 8600 GTS designs. The card does only come equipped with 256MB of memory that limits the higher resolution and filtering performance. It does support Direct X 10 and SLI configurations.

The GeForce 8600 GTS has lost much of its luster since the release of the GeForce 9600 cards. The nice part about this though is that prices are dropping for the older but still quite functional GeForce 8600's. The XXX GeForce 8600 GTS is a very affordable graphics card for those looking to use it for casual gaming. It does not support the PCI-Express 2.0 standard, but cards in this category tend to not benefit too much from it. It does fully support the Direct X 10 standard though. The card only features 256MB of graphics memory so don't expect much in terms of high end performance at higher resolutions or with large amounts of filtering.