Value for Money Video Card PCI Express

It is always hard to make a selection from the wide range of video cards available. Do I get value if I pay $900 for the latest card ?  Is the 256 meg video card always do better than the 128 meg card ?.

The comparison is for the PCI Express type video cards. PCI express slot is gaining momentum. with new Pentium 4 and Pentium D and the Athlon 64 (939) motherboards providing mainly PCI Express slots. Days for the AGP seems to be numbered.

We have put the $$$ in front of the frame rate data provided by tomshardware website.   You can see the full article by toms website here. The data is based on Gigabyte PCI express video card prices and the Frame rate data provided by Tomsharware website.

What you see on the graph on the right side is Frame rate per $100 of spend. For example Radeon X300 SE card which cost $111 will give you 47 frames per second in Unreal Tournament (when playing at low end settings ). That we translate as  47 / $111 = 43 frames for every $100 you spend.  I know once you have got the card, you can't put another $100 to the card and double your performance, but at least with the comparison you can make the right decision based on what performance you need and how much money you want spend.

This graph on right is based on running games on low end settings. As you can see you get the best value for money from the GeForce 6200 TC64 (GeForce 6200 with 64 bit interface (Gigabyte NX62TC128D - GEF6200TC,128MB,64bit, PCIEx16, DDR4Mx32, DSUB, TVOUT, DVI, TWINV) at $141.70 is the best value video card.

Video cards for Middle to high end gamers

Next comes the card for gamers. So we had a look at performance with high end settings.   We find the GeForce 6600 GT at $340 will give you 35 frames per second for your $100.