Good budget PCI-E x16 card?

bluestrobe

Platinum Member
Aug 15, 2004
2,033
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This is going in my wife's computer who plays at most, The Sims 2. She was using a Radeon X700 but it is AGP and due to unforeseen problems I am upgrading her computer to a Gigabyte GA-EG31M-S2 with a Core 2 Duo E7200 and Crucial 2GB DDR2 800 RAM.

Anyways, I'm down to finding a video card for under $50 but is still better than a X700 and the onboard motherboard video chipset (Intel GMA 3100). I was checking out the Sapphire 1010 Radeon HD 2600XT 256MB video card but can't find much on it. So would this a decent card for a moderate gaming rig or are there choices better than this for under $50? My knowledge of video cards is somewhat limited and the lack of a true comparison chart makes it harder to chose.
 

edm

Senior member
Mar 7, 2000
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Yeah it's good for what you are looking for and should perform much better than the onboard video.

You can find some benches at this Link (click select all near the bottom)

Cant really beat it for the price. It performs close to a 8600GTS or 7950 GT.
 

s44

Diamond Member
Oct 13, 2006
9,427
16
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The 2600XT is about what you're looking for at that price, but that's a crippled version with GDDR2. The Egg has some GDDR3 ones for under $50 if you do rebates, or ZZF has this $50 one.
 

codyz2035

Member
May 19, 2008
33
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i got a xfx nvidia geforce 8400 GS for about $40 wich isn't bad. it's not a hardcore gaming card by any means but it will get the job done just fine. it will run the latest games at a fair quality.