The Right Graphics Card for Your Need

Continued from page: 6

Monday, October 01, 2007

Entry-level cards

This segment is for those users who want to boost their onboard graphics accelerator or for those whose motherboard is devoid of that. With the emergence of Blu-ray and HD quality movies, users now have a new movie-viewing experience. But today very few motherboards having onboard graphics accelerator are capable of rendering such high definition image quality. So, a graphics card will enable a user to experience the full potential of high quality movies. This category comprised of nVidia's 7300, 7200 and 8400 cards and from ATI there were cards from 1550 and 2400 series.

3D Mark 06 and Vista score
As these were low-end cards the 3D Marks score were not as high as with other categories. Here the leader was Palit 2400XT with 1805, followed closely by GeCube 2400XT scoring 1767 and Galaxy 8400GS managing a score of 1690. As 3D Mark 06 contains a lot of graphics intensive tests, some cards were not even able to cross 1000. The Vista scores for overall experience varied between 3.3 and 3.5, which is good and implies that you can harness full Vista experience along with Aero. The GeCube 2400XT being the only one to score 3.5. For Vista gaming, the same card lead with a score of 4.5, while others managed with a gaming score of 4.4.

F.E.A.R
For a graphics intensive game like F.E.A.R. we tested these cards at a resolution of 1024 x 768 only. Again Palit and GeCube with their 2400XT cards lead the show with scores of 26 fps each. With 512MB RAM, XFX 8400GS, Sapphire 1550 and GeCube 1550 Pro were able to score at 23 fps. Similarly, other cards of 8400 series scored between 21-23 fps, while 7200 and 7300 series cards had given a frame rate of around 21.

Palit HD2400XT

Company of Heroes
This being a DirectX 10 game, many cards fumbled here as they only support DirectX 9. Though 8400 and 2400 series cards gave better performance with scores exceeding 15, these were the only cards that support DirectX 10. Other cards obtained scores ranging from 11 to 13. The leader again was Palit 2400XT that gave a performance of 16.2. Here also the performance was tested at 1024 x 768.

Doom 3
The graphics cards were put to some real stress by Doom. So, for entry level cards high scores were not expected. Palit 2400XT emerged winner again with 23.1 fps, while XFX and Galaxy's 8400GS cards were not far behind at 22.5 fps. MSI 7300LE gave good performance as it has 128 MB RAM and is able to fetch a frame rate of 21.2. The tests were not done at higher resolutions as an increased resolution would make frame rendering choppy and result in a poor gaming  experience.

BioShock
No surprises as Palit 2400XT excelled again, followed closely by Zebronics 8400GS. Palit clocked a frame rate of 14 at 1024 x 768 resolution. The Zebronics 8400GS didn't lag much and gave 13 fps. For other cards, the frame rate was not very high, hovering between 8 to 11 fps. This is because these cards could not render the graphics that the game demands.

Galaxy Geforce 8400GS

The verdict
As this is the price specific category the weightage for price was highest. For features and performance, weightage was equally distributed. For performance, major emphasis was given to Vista scores, followed by equal weightages to other game scores. For features we looked at HDCP and HDMI compliance and the DirectX 10 support available with these cards. The cards that were SLI/Crossfire ready were also given extra points for features. We received 90 cards and majority of them were into entry-level and budget range categories. In the detailed scorecard we could provide scores for 75 cards only and the missing 15 fall mainly in this category. . However, all of the cards were tested and a few noticeable performers amongst them are Galaxy 7300LE, Point of View's 7200GS and Galaxy (BiG) 8400GS. The GeCube 1550 and 1550 PRO cards boast of 1 GB Hyper Memory. Their onboard memory was 256 and 512 MB respectively and so they access the remaining memory from your system's RAM.

XFX 8400GS

Editor's choice
Two cards finished first in this category: Palit 2400 XT and Galaxy 8400 GS. The former is priced at Rs 3,990 and is both HDCP and HDMI compliant, while the latter is priced at Rs 3,000 and supports HDCP and DirectX 10. Palit belongs to ATI 2400 series and also supports DirectX 10, the reason why it performed so well in Company of Heroes. Its price, features and performance make it a worthy winner in the Entry Level
category. Though Galaxy matched the performance but with a lower price it equalled Palit in overall score.

Labs recommended
XFX 8400GS lagged behind on features and performance than the winners but pricewise it is cheaper than both. As this is a price conscious segment where performance doesn't matter much, this is a good choice.

For detailed score sheet of all GPUs with price, performance and features-click here

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