Budget Graphics Cards Tested Q3 2006 VGA Roundup
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Introduction
As much as we try to ignore it, there is no denying that the low-end market is there and a huge market to both nVidia and ATI in terms of revenues. So we thought about it and started sending some emails out and today we have eight graphics cards from an equal number of different companies.
GeCube, HIS, ASUS and PowerColor are all representing the red ATI team with the Radeon X1300 core while XFX, Albatron, Biostar and Palit represent the green nVidia team with the GeForce 7300GT core. All cards start at roughly the same price and offer a few different variants which we will be looking at today.
If you want to do a bit of gaming but your budget is tighter than you wish it was, this is the roundup for you. Placing the cards through a number of different benchmarks we will see what sits where and which area you should be focusing those hard earned dollars on. Some are perfect for your Home Theater PC and others are tweaked for better gaming performance.
We will be following a slightly cut down version of our normal graphics card review with each card getting a single page and using the same benchmarks that are used in our monthly Catalyst performance articles as they offer a good range of synthetic and real world tests that offer Direct3D, OpenGL, HDR, Anti Aliasing and Antistrophic Filtering testing environments.
So lets get started with the first card in the roundup, the GeCube X1300PRO HDMI, and follow on from there!
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