Best Graphics Cards For The Money: Feb. '09 : January Review/February Updates

January Review/February Updates

Detailed graphics card specifications and reviews are great—that is, if you have the time to do the research. But at the end of the day, what a gamer needs is the best graphics card within a certain budget.

So if you don’t have the time to research the benchmarks or if you don’t feel confident enough in your ability to pick the right card, fear not. We at Tom’s Hardware have come to your aid with a simple list of the best gaming cards offered for the money.

January Review and February Updates:

The big news for January was, of course, the introduction and hard launch of the new GeForce GTX 295. This new card is between a pair of GeForce GTX 280 and 260 cards in SLI on a single board. The differences are that Nvidia has shrunk the GT200 GPU by building it on a smaller 55 nm process and that its clock speeds are slightly lower compared to the original GTX 280. Regardless of the details, the new GeForce GTX 295 flagship is powerful enough to wrest the mantle of supremacy from the Radeon HD 4870 X2—and since it is available at the Radeon HD 4870 X2's former $500 price point, it's a winner.

Although performance of the new GT200 processor is identical to the original version at the same clock speeds, re-building the GT200 GPU on the smaller 55 nm process allows it to run cooler while requiring less heat compared to the original 65 nm GT200 processors found in the GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260. And since Nvidia has revamped its flagship GPU anyway, it's not just the new GeForce GTX 295 that benefits from the upgrade since the entire GTX lineup is having a face lift. First, the new GeForce GTX 285 is now available, which is essentially an overclocked GeForce GTX 280 with the new GT200. Secondly, the new GeForce GTX 260 is also built with the upgraded processor even though clock speeds and stock performance should remain the same.

We will note that there are now three versions of the GTX 260 cards: the original (65 nm process with 192 stream processors), the upgraded (65 nm process with 216 stream processors), and the new version (55 nm process with 216 stream processors). All three cards are called GTX 260s and all three have identical reference clock speeds. The newer cards with 216 stream processors are desirable because they'll show a performance improvement over the original versions with 192 stream processors and the brand new 55 nm cards are even better thanks to lower power usage and higher overclocking headroom. Unfortunately, all three versions are called the GeForce GTX 260, so the interested buyer has to do his or her homework before purchasing. Nvidia, if you're reading this, please consider differentiating them a little to avoid the confusion next time—calling them the GTX 260, GTX 260+, and GTX 265 would have made a lot of buyers' lives easier.

On a side note, now that Nvidia has the high-end sewn up with the GeForce GTX 295, we're hoping that it can adapt the strong points of the GT200 architecture to a low-end GPU. Right now, the $60 GeForce 9500 GT can't really compete with the identically-priced Radeon HD 4650. And while the 9600 GSO and 9600 GT are great cards for $70-$85, the falling prices of the Radeon HD 4830 really make it difficult to recommend them.

Speaking of Radeons, AMD has not sat idly by with the introduction of these new GT200-based cards from Nvidia—but with no new products on the immediate horizon, it is competing on price. Now that the 4870 X2 is no longer the performance king, online prices for the X2 have been slashed by $70 to $430, making the Radeon HD 4870 X2 a compelling buy for the money. However, even more compelling is the price cut of the Radeon HD 4870, which can be found for under $200. Other prices have fallen quite a bit as well, which changes the landscape somewhat and you'll see more about that in the rest of the article.

On a final note, January 2009 has seen the release of the first AAA title that uses Nvidia's PhysX physics processing enhancements out of the box: Mirror's Edge. This is forcing us to consider that PhysX may become a factor in future "Best Cards for the Money" articles if more blockbuster game titles support PhysX in meaningful ways. As this article's focus will remain on price/performance in the gaming arena, buyers who might be interested in other factors such as GPU processing, CUDA, and GPU-assisted media encoding might want to do some research before purchasing.

Some Notes About Our Recommendations

A few simple guidelines to keep in mind when reading this list:

* This list is for gamers who want to get the most for their money. If you don’t play games, the cards on this list are more expensive than what you really need.

* Prices and availability change on a daily basis. We can’t offer up-to-the-minute accurate pricing info, but we can list some good cards that you probably won’t regret buying at the price ranges we suggest;

* The list is based on some of the best U.S. prices from online retailers. In other countries or at retail stores, your mileage will most certainly vary;

* These are new card prices. No used or open-box cards are in the list—they might be a good deal, but it’s outside the scope of what we’re trying to do.

* You'll notice the Newegg theme on this piece, similar to what you see in our System Builder Marathons. Before this story goes live, we're hunting down the best prices on these recommendations to present. That doesn't mean prices won't change later, but you should at least get a good idea of the low prices for most of our suggestions.

How Much Power Does Your Graphics Card Need? : 3D Performance Requires The Most Electricity

3D Performance Requires The Most Electricity

The power consumption of today's graphics cards has increased a lot. The top models demand between 110 and 270 watts from the power supply; in fact, a powerful graphics card under full load requires as much power as the rest of the components of a PC system combined. If you’re planning to upgrade to a dual-chip card or to extend your system with a second video card using SLI or CrossFire, then the GPU plays the biggest role in determining how many watts your next power supply must be capable of providing.

Powerful graphics cards drive requirements for the power supply.

A stable power source is important if you want to avoid full-load crashes of the operating system, a.k.a. the dreaded “blue screen.” If you don’t have enough juice, then the PC or the power supply overheats, in the worst case, with a loud bang. The most important questions are: how many watts should the power supply have, does it deliver enough amps, and which plugs or adapters are necessary for the supply?

Of course, cost is also a factor. With today’s electricity prices, you must assess not just the cost of the hardware but also estimate the power used over the course of an entire year. If you don’t need ultimate 3D performance and are looking for a graphics card for your HTPC that’s more economical, you can compare four generations of AMD and Nvidia chips here.

Nvidia's GeForce GTX 285: A Worthy Successor? : Faster And Cheaper

A manufacturing process shrink is a lot to get excited about for both vendors and their customers, as the change normally leads to increased performance and efficiency, while reducing production cost by increasing the number of units produced per wafer. But the eventual benefit to design firms often comes at a huge up-front cost, since significant alterations normally result in bugs that need to be fixed before a full production run can begin. Each test run costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, so it pays to get things right the first or second time. Production delays are an even costlier problem when new architecture is involved, which is why Nvidia normally updates its current products before introducing any new ones.



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Today’s updated product, the GeForce GTX 285, makes the typical promises of improved performance and efficiency compared to the GeForce GTX 280 on which it is based. Let’s take a quick look at how it compares to other high-end solutions.

	GeForce GTX 285	GeForce GTX 280	GeForce GTX 260	GeForce GTX 295	Radeon HD 4870 X2
Manufacturing Process	55 nm TSMC	65 nm TSMC	65 nm TSMC	55 nm TSMC	55 nm TSMC
SPs	240	240	216	480 Total	1,600
Core Clock	648 MHz	602 MHz	576 MHz	576 MHz	750 MHz
Shader Clock	1,476 MHz	1,296 MHz	1,242 MHz	1,242 MHz	750 MHz
Memory Data Rate	2,484 MHz	2,214 MHz	1,998 MHz	1,998 MHz	3,600 MHz
Frame Buffer	1 GB	1 GB	896 MB	1,792 MB Tot.	2 GB Tot.
Memory Bus Width	512-bit	512-bit	448-bit	448-bit x 2	256-bit x 2
ROPs	32	32	28	56 Total	32 Total
Price	$380	~$340	~$260	~$500	~$430

The GeForce GTX 285’s most noticeable performance-oriented improvement is an increase in GPU clock speed of around 8%. The memory clock increase–while much larger at 12%–is likely not as important for performance. GeForce GTX 295 graphics units get two of these processors, although each one is handicapped with slower GPU speed, memory speed, and memory bus width. Meanwhile, AMD earns bragging right for both GPU clock and memory data rates, but only because less-complex graphics processors typically clock higher and GDDR5 memory uses a quad-data rate bus.

The specific card in today’s review is a special "XXX" sample of XFX’s GeForce GTX 285, model GX-285N-ZDDF, sporting a core clock of 670 MHz and GDDR3-2500. The larger numbers look more impressive than they are, since these are less than 4% GPU and 1% RAM above the reference specification, so we’ll split the difference and consider it a likely 2-3% average improvement over base speed.

In addition to the basics, XFX includes a door tag, the game Far Cry 2, a DVI-to-HDMI adapter, and an S/PDIF breakout cable. The breakout cable connects a motherboard’s internal S/PDIF audio output to an input adjacent to the card’s power connections, and the combined audio/video signal can be accessed though the output of the HDMI adapter. While this method has been available on Nvidia products for several generations, many previous packages did not include the special cable.