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Low to Mid-Range PCIe Video Card Roundup

Videocards/VGA Reviews by piotke @ 2006-05-19

In this roundup we compare seven different video cards which don?t cost you an arm and a leg. Using FRAPS and several popular games we test the performance and try to find the best value for your money. Want to play the latest games with a budget friendly graphics card? Read on to find out which one to pick.

Mid Range in Detail // Benchmark Methodology

$170-220 Gets you this

Asus X1600XT Silent

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This card is based on a mid-range chip from ATI, the X1600 series was launched at the same time as the X1800, aiming at providing acceptable gaming performance at a reasonable price. This version from Asus is a bit more expensive due to the inclusion of a passive cooling system.

Asus provides a small break-out box which serves as video in/output for s-video and composite. You get a nice software bundle and a couple of (not too recent) games also.

Club 3D X1800RX (X1800GTO)

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The X1800GTO from ATI was released to provide competition for nVidia’s mid-range 7600GT card. The Club 3D version uses the stock heatsink and fan which supports fan throttling, and lowest fan speed the card is one of the most silent in the roundup (except for the passive units of course) at high fan speed it becomes one of the loudest, unfortunately.

Inside the box you’ll find quite a bit of extra cables, those for video in/out (s-video and composite) a spare s-video out cable, 6-pin PCIe power cable to 2x4-pin, Cyberlink’s software package and 2 games, WWF Panda and Colin McRae 2005.

eVGA 7600GT CO

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The first of two eVGA products in the roundup, the CO version (CO stands for Copper) comes with a Copper cooler and has slightly higher clocked GPU and Memory speeds compared to the nVidia reference values.

This mid-range chip from nVidia does not require an external 6-pin power connector and the card is actually quite small. The cooler is compact but quite load at full speed and at low speed it is still quite noticeable.

No games are included in the package; you do get necessary s-video/composite out cables and two DVI->VGA connectors.

eVGA 7600GT CO SuperClocked

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The SuperClocked version does not differ a lot from the other eVGA model, the clock speeds are higher, and the heatsink and fan have a slightly different look, the fan spins slightly faster, being 1-2dBA noisier. The contents of the box are identical to its slower clocked brother.

This sample card from eVGA had traveled quite a bit, from hardware site to hardware site, after installing the card in test system I ran into problems in 3D applications:

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Looking closer at the video card I discovered a missing SMD-capacitor close to the PCIe connector:

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Luckily this small SMD-capacitor was still in the box, so using my trusty soldering iron I reattached it:

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With fingers crossed I restarted the system with the repaired eVGA card and… everything worked again!

Benchmark Methodology

Low and mid-range video cards aren’t meant to play the latest games at highest details and resolutions; however they should be able to give you an acceptable gameplay experience; older games run even quite well on these cards at high detail and that is of course a good thing.

The following games were used to measure the performance using FRAPS to log the minimum and average frame rate:

Call of Duty 2

Oblivion

Colin McRae 2005

Battlefield 2

F.E.A.R.

Manual run-throughs are illustrated with a small gameplay movie and we try different resolutions and IQ settings to find a good balance.

Let’s the benchmarking begin ->

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