Three-way budget graphics card shootout: what do you get for &pound;30?

Final thoughts

So what does a £25-£30 discrete graphics card buy you?

The answer is just about acceptable gaming performance for a 1,024x768 resolution that's married to low-to-medium in-game I.Q. settings.

That's true for a GeForce 8400 GS or a Radeon HD 3450, and each GPUs strengths are realised in different fast-paced games - NVIDIA's tends to be a little faster in OpenGL titles and ATI's in D3D.

As a comparison, the cards tend to be around 33 per cent faster than the integrated graphics in an AMD 780G chipset.

Make no mistake about it, however, these cards baulk at the term 'eye candy', so don't expect rendering miracles.

Looking at a straight fight between the two underlying GPUs - GeForce 8400 GS or HD 3450 - and knowing that gaming performance is similar, we'd opt for the Radeon HD 3450, because it has a nicer 2D feature-set, including native HDMI support.

What muddies an overall recommendation is the continued pesky presence of an actively-cooled Radeon HD 2400 XT GDDR3; it's the fastest of the quartet and doesn't cost that much more, at £33.

But what if you want a passively-cooled graphics card and have around £30 to spend? We'd go for the Sapphire Radeon HD 3450 512MiB, just. Twin dual-link DVI is a bonus and the card's 512MiB framebuffer may come into use if you choose to dial-in antialiasing and anisotropic filtering at the expense of framerate.

What's good to know is that there are no bad cards at the very bottom rung of the discrete ladder.

HEXUS Awards

Sapphire Radeon HD 3450 512MiB

HEXUS Where2Buy

The Gigabyte GeForce 8400 GS 256MiB is currently available for £25.84 here.

The HIS Radeon HD 3450 Silence 256MiB is currently available for £31.02 here.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 3450 512MiB is currently available for £29.95 here

Please, please note that delivery prices, should you need to pay them, will skew the value proposition massively.

HEXUS Right2Reply

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