Best Graphics Cards For The Money: January 2012 (Archive)

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[citation][nom]snipersam15[/nom]That Radeon HD 7870 LE looks promising, I wish it came out a lot sooner though would have saved me a lot of grief. Ah well that's how the pc game works I suppose.[/citation]

Yes, the AMD Radeon HD 7870 LE has 7950/7970 tech at around $250! That's amazing, and it represents the best value ever seen in a mid range, performance graphics card. 2 7870 LE's in crossfire would easily blow anything else out of the water for $500.

The 7870 LE can even be used in crossfire with a 7950! :)

Here's what some owners of the 7870 LE have to say:

"Hangs with and/or beats some 7950s in some benchmarks."

"This easily outperforms all other 7870 cards, and with a mild overclock, it performs essentially identical to the 7950 in my other system."
 
[citation][nom]Draconian[/nom]If you really want a budget gaming card, you can find used Radeon 4850's on eBay for about $30. Half the cost of a 6670 and pretty much identical performance.[/citation]

A Radeon 4850 does not support every game anymore (at least one new title coming out that is DX11 and up only and undoubtedly more to come doesn't go well for cards that only support up to DX10.1) and is generally higher performance than any Radeon 6670. It's closer to a Radeon 6750.
 
[citation][nom]Sakkura[/nom]I disagree. Benchmarks have shown that the 1 GB 7850 performs like the 2 GB 7850 in pretty much all games at 1080p. It's only at higher resolutions that the 1 GB VRAM becomes insufficient. Of course, over the next few years games will gradually demand more VRAM at a given resolution (and settings), so you could get the 2 GB version for future-proofing. But the 1 GB version is definitely a legitimate option for 1080p gaming.[/citation]

Tom's has proven that the 7850 1GB does in fact have issues in some games at 1080p. However, fixing that is as easy as changing a setting slightly, so it's not a big deal. The Radeon 7850 1GB should not be removed from recommendation IMO because it can still provide an excellent experience for the money with its price.

@mohit9206
Just because the 7850 1GB has trouble in a handful of games at 1080p without slightly reduced settings on the memory capacity intensive settings doesn't mean that it should be dropped from the recommendation so long as the price is competitive. To use an example given earlier, the Radeon 7770 or 7750 can't do far more situations than the Radeon 7850 1GB can't do, yet when the price is right, they can get a recommendation. Most products can be good deals regardless of any shortcomings so long as the price is right.
 
[citation][nom]Brett928S2[/nom]Hi I read what you said about 7990`s not being official... lolWell my shops are selling a LOT of them official or not, and I use them myself...NOT have the most powerful graphics card in the world (TH COMPARISON) on the list is unforgivable... To be honest it looks like Bias...All the best Brett[/citation]

The list includes official cards. The Radeon 7990 is technically just a vender-made mathup of two 7970s rather than an official AMD card, so the Radeon 7990s are technically not AMD cards in the fullest sense that that would imply. Whether or not they are sold does not change that. Also, they're usually in low supply even compared to most modern dual GPU cards that are official.

That's probably a considered factor in them not being on the list. I don't think that it'd hurt to have them on the list seeing as how Tom's has benchmarks a few of them, but I don't think that it's fair to accuse them of bias when they've given they're reasoning (which is fairly sound) for not having it in the list. I can name many cards that are unofficial and not on the list.

Maybe you have shops that are selling many of them, but most are not according to what I've read.
 
[citation][nom]hytecgowthaman[/nom]Nvidia has only 2 card stand in this gpu competition very bad and no gpus from Intel for competition that's very very bad . so low level to high level price point amd wins quietly .[/citation]

Intel doesn't even have any modern discrete graphics cards to compare. They haven't had a discrete gaming/consumer-oriented graphics card in a long time and even when they did, I'm pretty sure that it wasn't very competitive. Besides, this is a recommendation list with current prices to consumers, not a business report on the two companies. It's not like AMD has Nvidia cornered.
 

Yes, if you go looking for the most memory-intensive games and settings possible, you can get the 7850 1GB in trouble. It's just a pretty rare thing today. Over the coming years it will get more common.
 
In my opinion a review site should not ever be tied to actually selling products in any way. Having the "Buy" links simply moves Tomshardware in the direction that many review sites have gone the last few years, which means losing their unbiased position, and giving us articles which essentially tell us nothing.

I'm all for Tomshardware making money, but this is going too far.
 


I totally disagree. There is no conflict of interest as the buy links have nothing to do with our recommendation process or our advertising clients.

First, I look at prices of average products and create price/performance recommendations in general. After that, and only after that, I literally go through the products on Newegg and find the best deals for each recommendation. I am not given any direction as to the manufacturers whatsoever. I base the recommendation purely on price/performance, that is why the products that get a link are the cheapest in their category at the time of writing.

By definition this order of operations does not create bias as we take no manufacturers feedback into account when creating our recommendations.
It's 100% price/performance.
 
Well, AMD cards look good on price/performance, but are still "plagued" by some of stuttering problems in their drivers, Nvidia has an advantage over AMD, so, if i wanted to upgrade, probably would be a 670 (i got a 7950 a few months ago because of the price).
 
[citation][nom]kristi_metal[/nom]Well, AMD cards look good on price/performance, but are still "plagued" by some of stuttering problems in their drivers, Nvidia has an advantage over AMD, so, if i wanted to upgrade, probably would be a 670 (i got a 7950 a few months ago because of the price).[/citation]

Submitted for your consideration:

http://techreport.com/discussion/24218/a-driver-update-to-reduce-radeon-frame-times#metal

Also of interest: http://www.overclock.net/t/1339698/the-eternal-question-which-is-better-hd-7870-vs-660-ti-benchmarks-inside
 
Cleeve how accurate is that hierarchy ? Has Intel really caught up ?
I just looked up my company laptop in the list. It's only one tier above the Intel HD 4000 chip.
My system features a 7400M, a rebranded 6400M, and plays most games I've tried rather well. Including titles like ruse and torchlight 2. It wasn't too happy with borderlands 2, but then again I can't imagine an intel cpu doing almost just as good.
 
[citation][nom]neiroatopelcc[/nom]My system features a 7400M, a rebranded 6400M, and plays most games I've tried rather well. Including titles like ruse and torchlight 2. It wasn't too happy with borderlands 2, but then again I can't imagine an intel cpu doing almost just as good.[/citation]

Try an Ivy Bridge in those games and then get back to me. 😉

There's a reason Intel HD graphics has gotten a lot of good press with the newest chipset.
 
[citation][nom]Cleeve[/nom]Try an Ivy Bridge in those games and then get back to me. There's a reason Intel HD graphics has gotten a lot of good press with the newest chipset.[/citation]
I can see we've got some HP SpectreXT Pro's
Will try to locate one and test ruse on it if permitted. Not entirely sure who they belong to yet.
 
I miss the old format of this article where is mentioned whether specific gaming resolutions were called out as average/good/great/exceptional etc for each card.

For example what's the minimum card needed in your list for exceptional performance at 1920x1200 resolution. Is it a 7970, GTX670, 7950 boost , 7870 LE, 7870?
 
[citation][nom]Anonymous[/nom]I miss the old format of this article where is mentioned whether specific gaming resolutions were called out as average/good/great/exceptional etc for each card.For example what's the minimum card needed in your list for exceptional performance at 1920x1200 resolution. Is it a 7970, GTX670, 7950 boost , 7870 LE, 7870?[/citation]

The issue with that is that games these days have a huge variety in performance levels. For example, maxing out a game such as World of Warcraft at 1080p probably doesn't top BF3 with medium settings in intensity on the graphics cards. There are newer games with similar graphics intensity and games with greater graphics intensity than even BF3, so it's not necessarily easy to say what is exceptional and what is not. Besides, that's fairly subjective too. Some people might consider something exceptionally good whereas some others might consider that same thing exceptionally weak.

I'd say that at a minimum for 1080p, something like a Radeon 7870 or GTX 660 Ti will do an excellent job, but like I said, it's a very subjective thing to say.
 
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