Sub $100 Budget Videocard Roundup

I am more of a performance freak myself and I often forget that everyone is not this dedicated to the humble videocard. Most people don't "enjoy" spending $500 every six months just to keep up with the newest technology just so they can do this.

Let's face it, most of us really don't need the latest and greatest videocard on the block, heck if 75Hz refresh rates don't give you a headache you can get by on some of the cheapest videocards around without a problem.

Today we're going to take a look at seven videocards that are priced under $125 CDN ($80USD) and see how they fair in various applications from Winbench to SPECviewperf to 3DMark. After all, offices, schools, and other "normal" places do not need to buy really expensive video cards just so their staff or students can surf the web or type up a report. Our thanks to Perfect Systems for lending us these videocards to test.

The videocards we used are listed below and were subjected to a whole slew of 2D and 3D benchmarks.

video card comparisons
	hercules prophet 4000	hercules prophet 4500	pine 6326	powercolor m64	asus v7100 pro	ati xpert 2000pro	ati xpert 98
chipset	kyro	kyro 2	sis 6326	tnt2 m64	geforce2 mx400	rage128 pro	rage gl
ramdac	270 mhz	300 mhz	175 mhz	300 mhz	350 mhz	300 mhz	230 mhz
core width	128 bit	128 bit	64 bit	128 bit	256 bit	128 bit	64 bit
memory size	64mb	64 mb	8 mb	32 mb	64 mb	32 mb	8 mb
memory width	128 bit	128 bit	64 bit	64 bit	128 bit	128 bit	64 bit
price (cdn)	$80	$105	$35	$69	$125	$65	$35
extras	tv-out	n/a	n/a	tv-out	n/a	n/a	n/a

Video Cards Side by Side
Hercules Prophet 4000
Hercules Prophet 4500
Pine 6326
PowerColor M64
Asus V7100 Pro
ATi Xpert 2000Pro
ATi Xpert 98

While the prices range quite a bit, they're all at or under $125 CDN, a price point that is more than affordable.

The RAMDAC (Random Access Memory Digital to Analog Converter) speeds are what determine 2D quality. Using the Samsung 181B Samsung LCD monitor for testing we noticed that more often than not the Pine 6326 exhibited the worst 2D image quality of the lot. At a screen resolution of 1024x768-32bit at 75 Hz the letters all over the screen were just blurry.

Next in line was the the Xpert 98. Obviously with a low RAMDAC speed of 230 MHz the words were also a bit blurry. Good for it's day, but lousy compared to current technology. The next card was rather surprising, the PowerColor TNT2 M64 with a RAMDAC of 300 MHz was also rather bad. We often had to struggle to read words which were at font sizes of 2 or smaller. As for the Prophet 4000 and 4500, the V7100Pro and the Xpert 2000 Pro; they delivered crisp images even at a resolution of up to 1280x1024 (max for the monitor). Now its time for some benchmarking to see where your $125 or less are going ;)