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Unfortunately we weren't all born millionaires, because XFX would need to hire more staff so we could all run these beauties in CrossfireX. Today we bring you all right down to earth and focus on the competitive and highly lucrative £100 price point. Make no mistake, while we all drool over £900 video cards, the low end cards are where the biggest sales are generated.
Today we are looking at three products from leading manufacturers XFX, PowerColor and eVGA.
The eVGA card is a GTS450 which runs at 823mhz core (reference is 783mhz), shaders are 1645mhz (reference is 1566mhz) and memory is 900mhz (3.6Gpbs effective, same as reference). Even though it is an overclocked board, eVGA are selling it as their ‘regular' card and you can pick it up for £106 right now. This is the most expensive card on test today.
The Powercolor HD5750 low profile is a reference clocked card, weighing in with a 700mhz core and memory configured to 1.15ghz. It is far from a boring design however as the card is built around a custom PCB design with a dual fan cooler. Powercolor are calling it their ‘Low Profile' Edition and it seems to be an ideal pairing for a media center build. We have no price for this card, but we have been informed it will be targeted around £100 inc vat.
Last, but not least we have the XFX HD 5750 XXX Edition which is an OCUK exclusive model. This operates at 740mhz core and the 1GB of GDDR5 is running at 4800mhz effective. To make this card even more enticing it is a single slot design built around another custom XFX design. This is a pre order and you can pick it up for a wallet friendly £95 inc vat.
Today KitGuru finds out just what you can pick up for £100.
It is really good to see lower end cards reviewed here, the high end boards are great, but I doubt many people can afford them.
That XFX board is great. looks like a bargain to me.
This market is really so friggin sweet right now. anyone with a semi decent sized monitor, this is all they need. im not a gaming fanatic so maybe people wouldnt agree.
Nah its a good point Tom. if someone has a 1920×1200 screen, a 460GTX is all they need, unless they want crazy performance. 1080p, or 1680 then the cards on test today are great. the low end is so strong right now, it has to be killing high end cards sales.
I actually might pick one of these up for my kid brother for christmas. we are all putting a system together for him. cant believe how good the performance is for the price.
XFX and Sapphire, only cards to buy IMO
450GTS is good but I dont think its a dominating product like the 460 was. its killed 5830, and even hurt 5850’s. The 450 is a good board but the overclocked ATI cards are really going punch for punch.
I like that single slot design. the powercolor card is different but the shape looks weird.
Fantastic review, loads of detail and useful info.
wonder how long it will be for other sites to copy the return to idle concept 😉
GTS450 is a good card but I agree, it isnt dominating like the 460 is. the price is good and I like evga, this would be my choice out of the three, mainly cause I dont like catalyst.
@ Tri Color – Catalyst is great now, not a problem, I wouldnt let the drivers put you off the hardware.
@ Stefan – nah, they still suck. my buddy has a 5850 and the cat alyst 10.8 broke his HDMI scaling and every time he boots up he has to fix it. same with Cat 10.9. they are still a poor driver compared to nvidia forceware.