Gadgetory

hey guys this is Austin and today I'm taking a look at budget graphics cards are they even worth it to test I rounded up six cards under $120 and ran them through a few games and benchmarks to see how things stand at $70 we've got the Nvidia GT 630 and AMD r7 240 both sporting two gigabytes of slower ddr3 memory move up to the $90 bracket and you're looking at an Nvidia GT 640 along with the A&D r7 250 this time with 1 gigabyte of gddr5 each finally at $120 you're choosing between the nvidia gtx 750 and A&D r7 260x with the 750 only sporting one gig of ram where the 260x has two for testing I use the Mays on set up on a test bench you can check out that video for the full details but the basics include a core i3 4130 a gigabytes of RAM and a 250 gigabyte Samsung 840 Evo SSD to put things in perspective I also include the integrated HD 4400 graphics on the core i3 so if you decide to completely skip buying a graphics card altogether you get a little bit of an idea of what you can expect as far as the performance goes first off we have the fire stripe benchmark inside 3d Mart which can be punishing even on high-end hardware immediately you'll be able to see that the extra $50 over the lower end cards pays off as the 260 X is over three times as powerful here next we've got battlefield 4 a game that looks impressive across everything from consoles to $3,000 pcs as the title it's very nice 2 cards that happen to be red you'll see the AAB side wins easily here although again there's a massive difference as you spend just a little bit more Codemasters is one of the few companies who do racing games right and grid 2 is a great example here the Maxwell base GTX 750 does much better delivering over 90 FPS and soundly beating the rest of the group while it might be a little while before we see a new Bioshock game infinite really delivered easily being one of the best games of last year here we see the 260 X and 750 much closer with none of the cards really playable on this setting in the integrate HD 4400 graphics didn't even want to run one of the best stealth games I've played in a while Metro last light definitely doesn't skimp in the graphics department either again 750 barely edges out the 260x and the r7 250 is the only other card able to keep above 30 frames per second with the rest way back in the teens and 20s while gaming performance is very important when you go out to buy a new graphics card the amount of power requires can also be sometimes a big factor here the Intel HD 4400 in the core i3 easily wins with the rest keeping things between 70 and 100 watts or so as the only graphics card that needs external power the system with a 260x pulls in a still reasonable 133 watts under load so if you're putting together a budget gaming PC what should you go with now while the integrated Intel graphics are fine for most things when it comes to gaming they'd really just don't cut it if you want to get a dedicated card as cheaply as possible the r7 240 isn't a bad choice as it doesn't require much power and can play most games fine as long as you bump the settings down a bit as far as the GT 640 and r7 250 go it's a bit of a harder sell sure they're a bit faster however for just a little bit more you can get much more performance this graph sums it up well I think the difference between paying 70 and 120 dollars means you'll be getting nearly three times as much performance letting you play games at 1080p at reasonable settings between the 260x and the 750 however is a much harder choice the r7 260x gives you twice as much memory which is only going to get more important as time goes on and you also get support for both mantle and true audio built-in on the other hand with the GTX 750 you're getting a slight bit more performance and significantly less power which is nice especially if you don't have a spare 6 pin lead from your power supply the final choice is up to your particular build however I think the biggest thing to take away from this video is to try to avoid super cheap graphics cards if you spend just a bit more you're going to be getting a lot more for your money so what do you guys think if you were building a budget gaming PC what would you use let me know in the comments below anyway I won't let you guys know that actually recently switched over to a new Facebook page so it's now facebook.com slash Austin not Duncan so of course they do lots of behind the scenes stuff post videos that kind of stuff so you guys might check it out the link will be in the description of this video anyway guys thank you so much for watching and I will catch you in the next one