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Good/Cheap Videocard?

M

morphingboy78

Junior Member
I need a pretty cheap videocard, I'm pretty much only going to be watching movies on my new rig, no gaming at all. Well except maybe like small little freeware games that doesn't require a totally awesome videcard. I'm thinking a videcard under $45 maybe $50. I'm on a real budget later. I'll upgrade later on but right now, that's all I need.
 
well 45 - 50 dollars aint much. im english by the way. over here we got computer fairs, dont know if u have them over there but u can pick up a Geforce 4 MX 420 or 440 for about 50 pounds sterling. should be roughly the same. try go for cheaper makes like MSI other makers like Asus and Creative are canny expensive.

beware though that the GF 4 MX isnt really a Geforce 4. it uses the N17 chip which is from a Geforce 2 but with a few tweaks n higher speeds. but having said that it will play almost any game at 800 x 600 u can even get 1024 x 768 on some older stuff.

On the ATI front im not sure about prices but the radeon 8500 should be fairly cheap and was meant to rival the GF 3. also the 9100 is pretty good for its price.

shop around on the net an you could find a higher spec card at the price you want.
 
I'd say if you are going to be watching DVD's on your PC then you should possibly lean towards ATI - they are better for DVD playback from my own experience.

It is NOT a huge difference but you can tell - if you are sitting further away from the screen it is possibly irrelevant though.

If you can stretch to around US$70 then you could pick up a very decent Radeon 8500LE check the latest prices at newegg.com

Otis - visions of old "canny" bag o' Tudor adverts flashed through the mind.
First thought was that you were a Geordie - but I note that you are from Middlesborough.

I'm from up near Galashiels originally - North of the border.
 
beware though that the GF 4 MX isnt really a Geforce 4. it uses the N17 chip which is from a Geforce 2 but with a few tweaks n higher speeds. but having said that it will play almost any game at 800 x 600 u can even get 1024 x 768 on some older stuff.
Click to expand...

nahh geforce4mx does use a geforce4 chip.. NV25...
though it has the pixel shaders disabled..

but it still has LMAII, which is one of the main features on the geforce4.. and it's what sets geforce4 apart from geforce3.

I'd say if you are going to be watching DVD's on your PC then you should possibly lean towards ATI - they are better for DVD playback from my own experience.
Click to expand...
yep.. only with ati's MMC player..
from my own experience(i just switched from geforce3 to radeon 9700pro), videos on the 9700pro are blurry(the scaling is bad). much more blurry than my geforce3..
dvds are pretty much the same..
 
You can get an ATI Radeon VE (AKA Radeon 7000) for under $40 shipped. It's not much for 3D gaming, but it has good image quality, and videos play well on it.
 
Originally posted by: virtualgames0
yep.. only with ati's MMC player..
from my own experience(i just switched from geforce3 to radeon 9700pro), videos on the 9700pro are blurry(the scaling is bad). much more blurry than my geforce3..
dvds are pretty much the same..
Click to expand...

Not at all - I'm talking about DVD playback with either Power DVD or WMP. There was a definite difference in the image quality with the Radeon 8500 (the only ATI card I've used) the DVD output is great with the Nvidia cards (no arguement) but the screen image is somewhat "grainier" than the ATI playback image.

It is not a big deal though - I'm perfectly happy with the "lower grade" image quality of my GF4 Ti 4200 😉
Click to expand...
 
Originally posted by: gtd 2000
Originally posted by: virtualgames0
yep.. only with ati's MMC player..
from my own experience(i just switched from geforce3 to radeon 9700pro), videos on the 9700pro are blurry(the scaling is bad). much more blurry than my geforce3..
dvds are pretty much the same..
Click to expand...

Not at all - I'm talking about DVD playback with either Power DVD or WMP. There was a definite difference in the image quality with the Radeon 8500 (the only ATI card I've used) the DVD output is great with the Nvidia cards (no arguement) but the screen image is somewhat "grainier" than the ATI playback image.

It is not a big deal though - I'm perfectly happy with the "lower grade" image quality of my GF4 Ti 4200 😉
Click to expand...

really? why does my ati dvd quality suck more than my nvidia one then? maybe it's because i didn't install the decoder. damn decoder won't install because i don't have the ati cd... i used my neighbor's ati cd.. but it won't work either... damn ati..
here's a screenshot of my ati dvd quality, taken from powerdvd.

it's not even scaled yet.. once it's scaled.. it's much worse..
Click to expand...
 
I'm not really too sure why your ATI card has lesser quality than the Nvidia card.

I can only assume there is a range of quality and perhaps your card is at the lower end of that spectrum?

The Radeon that I have is made by Sapphire and is pretty much one of the cheapest options - it is a 64MB card that actually came with 128MB on board. The card also played Soldier of Fortune 2 far better than my GF4 Ti 4200 (much smoother) which is really against popular opinion (there was one other guy on these forums that thought his 8500 performed better than his GF4 too) much as your DVD playback quality seems the opposite.

It is hard to say from the still shot image how good or bad the DVD playback is compared to the Nvidia card - if you could do a side by side we might see more differences.

All I can say is that with my Radeon the image quality was sharper compared to the Nvidia cards (GF2 & 4) - I'll see if I can take a screen shot of a DVD movie on my GF 4 but I doubt it would really show anything as the image quality is already very good. When compressing the file to .jpeg there will presumably be some loss of image quality also?

On defense of the Nvidia cards though I did not see any great difference (if any at all) in 2D compared to the ATI card.

I certainly would never change to one brand from the other simply based on the DVD or 2D performance differences that I have observed for sure 😉

Is your Radeon a genuine BBA?
 
I'll take you on your word that you have a $50 limit. Putting aside the possibility of used cards I specifically recommend the Albatron GF4mx440sen, available for $50 shipped from newegg.com.

It's a lotta card for the money imo, and has nice default speeds.

GPU Clock 270MHz
Memory Clock 200MHz
RAMDAC 350MHz

The site says 5.3gb memory bandwidth, but they now ship with 4ns memory so it's actually got 6.4gb bandwidth. Nice passive cooling and svideo out.
 
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