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

Review: Three-way budget graphics card shootout: what do you get for £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

HEXUS invites manufacturers to comment on our review's findings. If any of the company's representatives wish to do so, their HEXUS Right2Reply will be written here, verbatim.

HEXUS related reading

HEXUS.net - HEXUS.reviews :: ATI Radeon HD 3450/3470/3650 preview
HEXUS.net - HEXUS.reviews :: ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT and Radeon HD 2400 XT - saviours or sinners?
HEXUS.net - HEXUS.reviews :: AMD 780G: integrated graphics redefined

Login with Forum Account

Don't have an account? Register today!

Good article.

It's a shame almost you couldn't fit the 3470 into your testing as I'm interested in getting one soon (for a HTPC and wanted to take advantage of the hybrid crossfire which the 36xx series doesn't allow). But that's just because it doesn't include the actual card I'm interested in getting :p

Definately proves at least that you can game on a budget, there are plenty who insist anything less than an 8800 / 3870 is not worth trying to play on. With casual gamers paving the way for the future… (supposedly) entry level cards I reckon will become increasingly significant in how Nvidia / ATI develop and market their products.

Thanks for the review, I don't mean to criticise it but isn't it too focused towards gaming. TBH, no one is going to buy these cards for gaming… They will only buy for HTPC usage. I think more attention on the HTPC capabilities (testing HDMI audio, testing different films and codecs, power consumption while decoding, testing with single core cpus too as many people make their old single core systems into htpcs). I have never seen HDMI audio being tested… It might not even work properly! Or it might not support all the lossless codecs or have other problems.

Typo in the overclocking table:
Graphics cards Gigabyte GeForce 8400 GS 256MiB HIS Radeon HD 3450 Silence 256MiB Sapphire Radeon HD 3450 512MiB
Clocks 459/918/800 594/594/792 594/594/990
Core/shader increase % 20.9 19.3 19.3
Memory increase % 22.5 11.4 3.6
ET: QW 1,280x1,024 increase % 23.8 14.1°C 13.3

SiM,

Thanks for the input. :)

I'd say you can game on these cards at 1,024x768 with basic settings.

As it happens, we have an upcoming article that talks about which choices one should make with respect to an HTPC system, and we'll explicitly look at all non-3D features in detail.

Tarinder
SiM,

Thanks for the input. :)

No problem. Thanks for the review :)
We all appreciate the hard work that you guys put into making them.

Tarinder
I'd say you can game on these cards at 1,024x768 with basic settings.

Well gaming on these card is possible with that configuration… but you get no where near the proper gaming experience. If you are going to buy 2 or 3 games its going to cost you around £40-50… why spend that much on games and only £30 on graphics? Personally, I think you need at least a 8600GT or a HD 3650 to get your money's worth any modern game.

Tarinder
As it happens, we have an upcoming article that talks about which choices one should make with respect to an HTPC system, and we'll explicitly look at all non-3D features in detail.

Awesome, I look forward to reading it :)

SiM
Personally, I think you need at least a 8600GT or a HD 3650 to get your money's worth any modern game.

I always like these kind of reviews, it's kind of weirdly cool to see what you can get at the bottom end. The other thing though is that 1024 x 768 isn't in fact a rubbish resolution, in fact it's damn near “high-def” as in HD-TV, which may well be one of the intended markets for these cards
*Hint* 1366 *Cough* 768 Hexus boys & girls
On top of all that, loads of people like playing older games (Diablo 2 anyone :).
I agree with your comment about ‘modern games’, but i still think the article has merit both has an interest piece, and a practical one.