Sub-80$ Graphics Card Battle

Today we are looking at what the best option in the sub-$80 graphics card market is for gamers, which led us to a direct comparison between the new GeForce GT 220 and the old Radeon HD 4670. The cards will be compared in a number of games while we will also look at their power consumption levels and overall value...

Recently Nvidia released the GeForce GT 220 codename “GT216”, which was to be their first ultra affordable GeForce 200 series graphics card. With an average price tag of $70 US, the GeForce GT 220 got the affordable part right, but how does it deliver in terms of performance?

With a core configuration that is around 4x less complex than the GeForce GTX 260, we are not expecting much, and the 128-bit memory bus means that the GeForce GT 220 is limited to a maximum bandwidth of just 25.3GB/s for cards sporting the more modern DDR3 memory, while some will feature cheaper DDR2 memory limiting them to just 16GB/s.

In comparison, a graphics card such as the GeForce GTX 260 has a memory bandwidth of 111.9GB/s, though you can expect to pay around $100 US more for this product. On the other side of the fence we have the Radeon HD 4650 and 4670 graphics cards, priced at $50 and $65 for the 512MB versions, while the 1GB cards cost around $10 more on average.

So then in terms of pricing it is far to say that the newly released GeForce GT 220 is going head to head with the old Radeon HD 4670 which was released a little over a year ago now. Given the age difference, one could be mistaken for thinking that the GeForce GT 220 would wipe the floor with the much older Radeon HD 4670 graphics card. Today we are going to find out if this is true.

Representing the new GeForce GT 220 we have a version from Inno3D and an overclocked card from Galaxy. Then for our Radeon graphics cards we have a HIS Radeon HD 4670 with 512MB of memory and a Gigabyte Radeon HD 4650 with a 1GB memory buffer, neither card featured factory overclocking.

Although we do not consider sub-$80 US graphics cards to be ideal gaming solutions, they will provide those on a tight budget with a means to play their favorite games. That said, even when spending such a small amount of money on a graphics card, you want to make sure you are getting the best value for your money, and we are hopefully going to help you do that.

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