If you want to play games on your PC, in most situations, we recommend you spend at least $100 USD on getting a video card. You can get very reasonable gaming performance for a video card around $100, such as say, currently a last-gen HD 4850, or NVIDIA’s workhorse G92-GPU 8800 GT / 9800 GT, or slightly more expensive, and capable, 9800 GTX+ / GTS 250.
But not all of us are big gamers; and some of us are very limited in the amount they want to dish out for a new discrete video card. Today we will take a look at some of your options.
The HD 5000 series has a large range of video cards, from the most basic, to the most extreme (the dual-GPU HD 5970). Today we’ll take a look at the sub-$100 video cards, including a XFX HD 5450, a PowerColor HD 5550, XFX HD 5570, and reference design ATI HD 5670. These video cards range from about $50 to about $90, for the HD 5670. By the way, we chose to look at any NVIDIA options in today’s comparison primarily because the company has not released a lower-end value card for a long while now.
The primary question when considering a sub-$100 video card is what it will give you beyond your integrated graphics solution that your motherboard probably has. Increasingly, integrated GPU — both in motherboards on the CPU — are geting more and more reasonable in their performance.
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- READ MORE (Source): HD 5000 series value video cards compared – Page 1 – Why go value?
