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Best Gaming Video Cards for the Money 208

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the he-wants-us-to-think-for-ourselves dept.
Tom's Hardware has decided to take a step back with their latest video card review. Instead of wowing their audience with in-depth benchmarks they head right for what someone reading a review really wants, an opinion of the best bang for the buck. From the article: "So if you don't have the time to research the benchmarks, or if you don't feel confident enough in your ability to make the right decision, fear not. We offer a simple list of the best gaming cards on offer for the money."
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Best Gaming Video Cards for the Money More

Best Gaming Video Cards for the Money

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  • ATI VGA Wonder ISA (Score:5, Funny)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2006 @03:47AM (#16211603) Homepage Journal
    You can get them for free in a junk bin. It's a video card, and bang divided by bucks, as bucks approaches zero the value of bang doesn't matter.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by log2.0 ( 674840 )
      Ahh, yes, but it depends from which side you take the limit. Not taking the limit at all means that the "bang for buck" is undefined!

      However, I think you meant to say "as buck tends to zero from the right, the bang for buck tends to infinity"....however, I doubt I would want to use this free graphics card :)

      • Commander Keen (Score:3, Insightful)

        by OrangeTide ( 124937 )
        If you were planning on playing Commander Keen, it would be a fine graphics card to own. Supports 132x60 text mode too, if you're one of those types that littles tiny letters. (Multi-sync monitor required)

        http://orangetide.com/vgadoc/ati.txt [orangetide.com] for register settings on your VGA Wonder, incase you want to access any enhanced features.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kuzb ( 724081 )
          If you were playing commander keen, and you're calling yourself a geek, we'd have to ask you to turn in your badge and gun before leaving.

          • Re:Commander Keen (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 27, 2006 @07:38AM (#16212577)
            What's wrong with commander keen? He has a cameo on Doom2, so he must be cool!

            Seriously, those games are pretty good. I enjoyed playing them when I was younger. And just like the later games from id Software, they were very advanced for their time. Previously, making a side-scrolling platformer with decent graphics had required hardware support, so they had only been seen on games consoles and arcade machines.
      • This is a new paradigm in interstellar travel! Infinite bang means infinite thrust.

        in theory, we could power a space ship out of donated remaindered copies of "Tek War."

    • ATI VGA Wonder ISA? I think on a time-scale, the bang is approaching zero faster than the buck...

  • we require more minerals (Score:5, Insightful)

    by macadamia_harold ( 947445 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2006 @03:53AM (#16211627) Homepage
    Instead of wowing their audience with in-depth benchmarks they head right for what someone reading a review really wants, an opinion of the best bang for the buck.

    What they missed though, was a comparison of all of those with at least one average on-board video implementation. Most of which nowadays are pretty damn good. (at least for things like Warcraft III, starcraft, non-bleeding-edge FPS games, etc). To really gauge "bang-for-buck", you need to measure against spending no extra money at all.
    • starcraft ran really REALLY well on my Voodoo Banshee.

      I don't think even today's integrated chips have to worry about starcraft.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ObsessiveMathsFreak ( 773371 )
      What they missed though, was a comparison of all of those with at least one average on-board video implementation. Most of which nowadays are pretty damn good.
      Woah, woah, woah! Have you actually used an average onboard video card lately? I can testify that mplayer has issues at high resolutions, and google earth gets about 0.5fps. A simple X terminal will consume large portions of CPU if the app spits out a lot to stdout.

      It's 2006. You need a video card.
      • It's 2006. You need a video card.

        It would be great, if, say, someone had done a video card shootout, and included onboard video as a control group. Then you could link to it to support your statement.

        • Re:sarcasm (Score:4, Informative)

          by grammar fascist ( 239789 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2006 @05:41AM (#16212107) Homepage
          I'm running Xorg-air + Compiz on an Intel 945GM, and it's very snappy. (Of all the plugins, only Blur makes it crank.) It doesn't even drain the battery more than regular 2D compositing.

          No, I can't play Quake IV on it, but I do have wobbly windows that stick to each other. :D Quake 3 and its generation all run fine.

          Take that, integrated graphics naysayers.
          • I'm tempted to call shenanigans unless you were running Q3 with everything off at 640x480. What kind of fps are you getting?
          • As you say battery, I must assume that you are running a laptop. Laptop video cards are not "onboard" so to speak. They are made for light to moderate gaming and thusly have WAY more processing power than a normal desktop onboard video.

            You have a laptop with a video card in it. Lots of laptops come with nvidia or ati video cards built in.

      • I agree, but in response to your post I suspect people are going to say "Whoah *need* a video card? Back in my day we calculated our vertex transformations by hand, in the snow, before breakfast and with no shoes on our feet" .... that or.. "pfft on my Linux workstation I don't need a graphics card for running firefox, I use my on-board graphics on my Pentium 3 from 2001 and it runs just fine. Who needs games anyway?"

        Maybe I'm just hanging around here too much :0'

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Breakfast Pants ( 323698 )
        It is quite clear to me from your post that you are running linux and you are running Google Earth with software GL. Check to see if drivers are available for your on-board chipset--if it is intel they likely are.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nazmun ( 590998 )
      Because you can just assume with any such old or non graphically intensive game will run with the most weak graphic processing setups. Any modern game that requires a graphic card would crawl with any integrated chip due to lack of dedicated video memory which is both an order of magnitude faster then system ram and not shared.

      Starcraft and warcraft 3 (with a sufficiently beefy processor and mobo, ie anything in the last 2 years) will run on any video card with even the most minute 2d and 3d acceleration c

  • Summary (Score:5, Informative)

    by LoverOfJoy ( 820058 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2006 @04:00AM (#16211659) Homepage
    Best PCIe Card For Under $100 - Radeon X800 GTO 128MB

    Geforce 7300 GT GDDR3 (second choice/tie?)

    Best PCIe Card For ~$140 - Geforce 7600 GT

    Best PCIe Card For ~$200 - Radeon X1900 GT

    Best PCIe Card For ~$250 - Radeon X1900 XT 256MB

    Best PCIe Card For ~$340 - Geforce 7900 GTX

    Radeon X1900 XTX (second pick)

    Best PCIe Card For ~$500 - Geforce 7950 GX2

    Best AGP Card For Under $100 - Radeon X700

    Geforce 6600

    Best AGP Card For ~$125: 3 Way Tie - Radeon X1600

    Geforce 6600 GT

    Radeon X800 GTO 128MB

    Best AGP Card For ~$130 - Geforce 7600 GS

    Radeon X1650 PRO

    Best AGP Card For ~$175 - Geforce 7600 GT

    Best AGP Card For +$200: None (Honorable Mention: Gainward Geforce 7800 GS+ silent 512)

    It looked like nearly every card one at whatever price they sell at. A category for $125 (a three way tie there) and a category for $130? It's ridiculous. 7 pages worth.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by LoverOfJoy ( 820058 )
      yes, "one" should be "won". That's what I get for typing at 2am.
      • I don't get it. How is it possible to confuse a numeral with victory when typing text? Are you using some kind of speech recognition, or having images of winning as being number one?-) Besides, what kind of a Slashdotter isn't used to typing at 2am?
        • I wonder if the portion of the brain that controls motor skills is connected to the part of the brain that creates language via the speach portions? That would explain why homophone typing errors occur far more often than would be expected.
          • I wonder if the portion of the brain that controls motor skills is connected to the part of the brain that creates language via the speach portions? That would explain why homophone typing errors occur far more often than would be expected.

            How about those spelling errors? Sounds like teach, looks like speech? Interestingly enough, I *never* used to make those kinds of errors. You can check back through my posting history and you'd be lucky to find an odd typo. However, these days I catch myself making h

            • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

              by AceCaseOR ( 594637 )

              nacturation wrote:

              How about those spelling errors? Sounds like teach, looks like speech? Interestingly enough, I *never* used to make those kinds of errors. You can check back through my posting history and you'd be lucky to find an odd typo. However, these days I catch myself making homophone-style errors with increasing, though still infrequent, frequency. Maybe it's my age -- approaching mid 30s -- that is a factor. And I also find that as I have more thoughts on my mind, my attention to detail slips a

            • I've actually improved (I was the bane of my English teachers in grade school) thanks to the little red underline in Word.
              Does anyone have a good reccomendation on a cheap dual PCIe card to be run in a 4 monitor setup? I've got the 4 monitors (1600sw) but need to upgrade the hardware to run them.

    • Re:Summary (Score:5, Informative)

      by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2006 @04:16AM (#16211715) Journal
      What they dont say, an Nvidia 7800 GT is twice as fast as an ATI 800, 140 bux or 100 bux, 40 bux buys a lot more power.

      I like toms hardware video card graphs to help quickly show how a card stacks up.
      http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/02/vga_charts_ viii/page16.html [tomshardware.com]

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by fisgreen ( 568052 )

        What they dont say, an Nvidia 7800 GT is twice as fast as an ATI 800, 140 bux or 100 bux, 40 bux buys a lot more power.

        Makes for a for an affordable screamer of an SLI rig, too. Also, I'm convinced Nvidia's drivers are so much better. I've regretted every ATI card I've ever tried, usually due to crappy drivers. Highly recommended.

      • Someone needs to put together a $$ vs Radness chart using that data & the price information from this new article.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Polo ( 30659 ) *
        Personally, I like the PC parts picking guide and it's graph of
        video card price vs performance.

        http://shsc.info/PCPartsPickingGuide#titelanker13 [shsc.info]

        Even more interesting is that their chosen graphics cards seem to
        scale -- more money gets you proportionally more performance.
        However if you scroll up to the cpu section, it doesn't scale so well.
    • A "what to buy" article like this has a significant effect on sales and advertisers perceptions - which is why almost every card won "in its category", to avoid pissing anyone off.

      Can you imagine if Tom's Hardware said "THE DEFINITIVE BEST VALUE CARD RIGHT NOW IS THE ... ATI RADEON (blah) GT!!!" ?

      Someone at Tom's Hardware would have lost some important friends at nVidia. Which is why we have 7 pages of fence-sitting instead :)

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Pharmboy ( 216950 )
        I think part of it is that NO card is "the best", as they are all different kinds of good. As confusing as comparing CPUs, it depends on what you are doing. I DID agree with the assessment of the "Best PCIe Card For ~$140 - Geforce 7600 GT" however.

        I just did a month of research and bought this exact card about 1 month ago, put it on an older i3.2ghz/HT w/1GB ram, and it does acceptionally well. The PNY unit I bought runs most games at the highest or near highest settings (HL2, etc) and have two dvi out,
      • A "what to buy" article like this has a significant effect on sales and advertisers perceptions - which is why almost every card won "in its category", to avoid pissing anyone off.

        Then what they should do is put each card on its own page, talk about how that particular video card is the best one ever, and fill the rest of the space with ads for that card and links to purchase one. Then they can throw out all pretenses of reviewing the hardware and objectivity.

      • Re:Summary (Score:5, Informative)

        by Damon Cleeve ( 1006579 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2006 @02:21PM (#16217837)
        I wrote the article, and I can tell you I didn't sit on the fence unless there were legitimate close performance runs. The problem is, with different architectures some cards will win some benches and other cards will win others, it's difficult to difinitively say one is better than the other when they trade blows based on which game you're playing. The reason there's 7 pages of article is because there's so damn many categories. And for the record, I admit the AGP section I submitted was screwed up a bit. The $130 AGP section should have been omitted, that was a leftover from an old version... I've been doing this article on the forums for the past year and a bit. The $130 AGP category should have been the 7600 GS, X1650 PRO, and X800 GTO... which all do perform very closely.
    • I find it hard to accept the fact that the 7600GT got the spot for $175 with no mention of the 6800GS (and don't give me any talk about "obsolete" when the 6600 is in there). The 6800GS spanks the 7600GT to the tune of a 256bit bus throwing 32GB/s versus 128bit bus pushing 22.4GB/s.
      See here...
      http://forums.vr-zone.com/showthread.php?p=2400829 [vr-zone.com]

      If somebody could tell me why the 7600GT is more deserving, I'd like to hear it... and yes, I'll take the card that's a bit more power hungry for almost a 30% increase
    • Best AGP Card For ~$175 - Geforce 7600 GT

      I can't seem to find a retailer who actually sells this card. Does it actually exist for the AGP bus?
      • Dunno, I went with a 7800GS instead as my last upgrade for this AGP gaming system. In another 2 years or so I'll finally replace this system with a 4-core AMD chip and a new PCIe video card.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Creepy ( 93888 )
      what frightens me is that I got an unlockable eVGA AGP 7800GS ~6 months ago for $4 cheaper (~$50 if you only count 4 * or better vendors like I ordered thru) than the cheapest price on pricewatch. It was $198 with express 2 day shipping (not sure if it was cheaper with slower shipping). It also proved unlockable with CoolBits, so I essentially got a 7800GT for the price of a 7800GS.

      sigh - I need to upgrade soon - I'm jealous of my dual 3GHz's at work (with an extremely crappy GPU that actually does affect

  • I don't know why... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Zorque ( 894011 )
    ...They went with the 128MB version of the x800GTO. On Newegg.com [newegg.com] you can get the 256MB version for $87, though to be fair it is third party. Strangely enough, I can't find an AGP equivalent for under $125.

    I'm currently using the 256MB AGP version because I'm extremely cheap (and don't want to reinstall Windows -again- when I get a new motherboard), and I can attest to how greatly it performs.
    • you can get the 256MB version for $87

      Read the reviews.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hkmwbz ( 531650 )
      Because the 250 MB version actually has significantly worse memory performance?

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by admdrew ( 782761 )
        Because the 250 MB version actually has significantly worse memory performance?

        You really shouldn't complain about reduced performance when you somehow managed to break 6 MB of RAM off of your card :P

    • Revert your controllers drivers to the generic ones that ship with Windows and uninstall your graphic drivers, too, then swap the disk and reboot - on first boot it will be a bit slow but will pick up all your hardware and then you can install the right drivers for the controllers.
      I've kept the same system across 3 different mobo's with different chipsets and processors - not a glitch.
      HTH
      • Windows bluescreened the last time I swapped a disk from an AMD box to an Intel one. Linux of course won't notice if you're using the i386 kernel builds.
    • "I think many "typical Linux users" are in the same boat: not too interested in playing games"

      And this my friends is the main problem the rest of us have with linux. Its not different ways to do things, it's not too hard to work with, it is the fact that linux has "no interest in playing games" that keeps linux off the desktop. Build it, and they will come.

  • Boring boring (Score:2, Insightful)

    by hedleyroos ( 817147 )
    I really don't see the point in newer and faster graphics cards for PC's anymore. When the GeForce2 launched I was still impressed and just had to have one, but now that I can actually easily afford any graphics card I find myself returned to my console roots. Why? Because the shiny graphics are boring.

    I can still play Baldur's Gate on my PC - that's all I need. Good enough graphics and great fun.

    Waiting for the Wii, waiting for the Wii...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xtracto ( 837672 )
      I have to agree with that. I am, as you waiting for the Wii, although this is going to be the first console I'll buy with great expectation since my father surprised me with the SNES... I owned an Xbox for like 6 months while in university but I got bored of the games (I preffer to make program myself).

      Now I have a notebook (3.06 Ghz, 1GB ram) which is great for my PhD student needs (darn, a P3-800 would be ok for latex-pdf-opera-linux combo... but I use Eclipse/java to run MAS simulations) and I believe a
      • *offtopic*
        someone wanting £160 for two tickets to see the killers?
        lot of money for a gig. You can see them at a festival next summer for that...
        yes i know it's not as `intimate`

        Just another example of people not buying tickets to see bands anymore but to sell on Ebay.
        I wish the fuckers at Ebay would stop allowing the re-sale of tickets but they're making too much money off it. /rant

  • Video cards (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pe1chl ( 90186 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2006 @04:45AM (#16211875)
    This list is for gamers who want to get the most for their money. If you don't play games but surf the Internet and edit video, the cards in this list are probably too expensive.

    It would be nice to have such a list for that type of usage.
    I want to run X with the usual apps, and to play video. At HD resolution.
    I think many "typical Linux users" are in the same boat: not too interested in playing games, want good performance for normal 2D and video.

    But the market is more focussed on gaming than on this, and when you get a low-end gaming card (I have an Nvidia 6600GT based card) you end up wasting a lot of power and generating heat, and still not have perfect video playing.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jimicus ( 737525 )
      I think many "typical Linux users" are in the same boat: not too interested in playing games, want good performance for normal 2D and video.

      But the market is more focussed on gaming than on this,

      Or you could use Xgl....
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xgl [wikipedia.org]
    • It would be nice to have such a list for that type of usage. I want to run X with the usual apps, and to play video. At HD resolution. I think many "typical Linux users" are in the same boat: not too interested in playing games, want good performance for normal 2D and video.

      This reads almost like an afterthought, but I think it deserves a +5 INSIGHTFUL. I can't count how many times I've read posts or articles on Slashdot concerning video cards and performance and wonder why I'm bothering to read any of it.
      • I run Linux and I want an extremely fast card. What benefits gamers benefits folks who work with graphics, multimedia, and 3D apps. On my new system I'm going 7600 GT - phenomenal performance for its price point (I draw the line for video cards at $200, or $300 for a video card with integrated tuner). Since I want to learn Blender, 3D performance is extremely important to me.

        More so now, in fact, since the advent of xgl. Since OpenGL acceleration is going to be used for conventional 2D operations, and 2D op
    • Agreed. I'm in the same boat; I rarely play games on my Linux machine, and when I do, they're typically 2D games anyway (*cough* TuxRacer *cough*).

      I'm using the video card that came in the computer when I bought it, and have found it to be pretty good: it's an NVidia Quadro4 NVS 280. Allegedly it's a $200 card for the AGP version, but I think you could find it for a lot less than that, based only on the fact that I got the entire computer that it's in for about $280. (It's a HP Workstation from Retrobox; I
    • Pretty much any built in video card on motherboards or any currently "new" video cards are heavily overbuilt for 2D and web surfing.

      IIRC, 32-bit color quality only requires 16 megabytes of RAM, so any video card that has twice that can handle desktop surfing quite easily.

      Well, unless you've decided to turn on massive anti-aliasing and layering like WinVista and such.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by pe1chl ( 90186 )
        Pretty much any built in video card on motherboards or any currently "new" video cards are heavily overbuilt for 2D and web surfing.

        Sure, but note I also mentioned HD video playback.

  • Missed target? (Score:3, Funny)

    by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2006 @04:55AM (#16211911) Homepage
    Specifications and reviews that really get into the nitty-gritty are great - that is, if you have the time to digest everything. At the end of the day, all a gamer really needs to know is what is the best video card for the money.

    No time but looking for the best video card for the money? Here, let me shortcut you to 7 pages of options.

  • Anti-aliasing at high-end (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tygerstripes ( 832644 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2006 @07:04AM (#16212443)
    I recently installed a fanless 7600GT. This thing makes no noise at all and, with careful internal cabling, has no problem being passively cooled.


    Now, playing HL2 at a resolution of 1680x1050 with HDR, AF, all the fancies turned on, it played fine but with a (barely) noticeable judder when things got really busy.

    So, I tried turning off Anti-Aliasing (this is one of the most demanding graphics features, as the GPU essentially has to treat each pixel as many pixels and work out the difference - it's to reduce the jagged, stepped appearance of diagonal lines). And d'you know what? I couldn't tell the difference at all. The frame rates went right up, but the appearance on screen was basically identical.

    It occurred to me that when you're at a decent resolution AA really doesn't matter - the individual pixels are so difficult for your eye to distinguish that diagonal lines look diagonal, whether anti-aliased or not.

    So basically, AA is an almost useless feature when you've got a good enough resolution. I can't find a game that will slow my card down - Doom3, Oblivion, you name it - and this card was less than £150. There's going to have to be a serious upping of the ante in games detail if anyone expects me to consider one of these £200+ cards to be of any worth.

    • Yes, almost exactly.

      Anti-aliasing is basically sampling parts of the image at 2x or 4x the resolution. 4x anti-aliasing is similar to just rendering at 2x the resolution (samples go up by square of resolution), except for the video card manufacturers can pull some fancy tricks to make it actually faster than that.

      When you are playing at a high enough resolution, you are already sampling at a high enough frequency that most artifacts will disappear.

      I think at 1024x768 you can still notice a difference, and o

    • So, I tried turning off Anti-Aliasing (this is one of the most demanding graphics features, as the GPU essentially has to treat each pixel as many pixels and work out the difference - it's to reduce the jagged, stepped appearance of diagonal lines). And d'you know what? I couldn't tell the difference at all. The frame rates went right up, but the appearance on screen was basically identical.

      I concur. I also just got a 7600 GeForce Go and I've been playing Half Life 2 with all of the settings maxed out. Wh

      • If you are running at a lower resolution (640*480) then simply turning on AA looks a lot better than upping the resolution. I get 25fps on Oblivion at 640 with AA, but only 16-19 when I run at 1024 with no AA (all other settings are the same.)

        But, yeah, if you are already running at 1024, turning on or off AA won't make a much difference in looks.

  • Instead of wowing their audience with in-depth benchmarks they head right for what someone reading a review really wants, an opinion of the best bang for the buck.

    Sorry Tom, but I have to disagree. What interests me is not your conclusions but your measurements leading up to it. I may have other preferences than you, what you consider barely acceptable performance may be more than I need, you may be able to accept more fan-noise than I, etc. If you provide me with the details, I'm perfectly capable of draw

    • If you provide me with the details, I'm perfectly capable of drawing my own conclusions.

      In which case you could read any one of the 87000 other articles and reviews that provide that additional depth. This article was quite clearly intended for those folks, and there are plenty of them, who don't want to spend more time buying a video card than than they would buying a car

  • Some graphics cards consume monstrous amounts of power, probably enough to add a TCO of $30 or more per year to the actual price. It would be great to see a price comparison that took into account the cost of power the thing ate during its lifetime.

  • The one problem with this list (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mdarksbane ( 587589 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2006 @08:30AM (#16212967)
    Is that it ignores feature support.

    For example, some fancier shading tricks are only supported in the Geforce 6800 and later (try running, say, the new Company of Heroes game on a 6600. You can get a great frame rate, but you're missing out on a lot of cool looking stuff).

    A lot of times going from one generation to the next (or from the consumer card to the once-flagship-card) will net you a lot more than just pure speed. I work for a gaming type company, and I know a lot of the features we use in some of our shaders just plain aren't supported on lower end cards, or are "supported" by the driver but are actually implemented in software, which means if we can't code around it the feature get disabled for that card, and your game won't look as pretty. It's becoming more and more of a concern with new games.

    It's still a nice quick snapshot intro to the graphics cards available, though. The sort of run down I try to do for people when they're asking what they should buy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Phaid ( 938 )
      The 6600 series cards are all newer than the 6800 series. They support all of the same API features. What really differentiates the Nvidia 6xxx series cards are hardware features -- number of pipelines, memory type and bandwidth, gpu and memory clock speeds, etc. The very low end cards like 6200 don't support 64-bit textures or SLI, but all of these support the same shader model. The same is true of the 7800/7600/7900 cards among each other. Of course, since the lower end cards in a given generation ar
      • They all support the shader model, but will the cost be the same?

        It doesn't really matter so much that they "support" a feature if it still kills your performance to use it.

        I'm just saying that it isn't a linear scaling of speed because of the degree of support for specific features. There's more of a difference sometimes than just the clock speed or fill rate.

        Or at least, there will be a practical one based on some games turning off features if they know you can't run them at full speed. Company of heroes

  • Why all the negativity? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by shoolz ( 752000 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2006 @11:36AM (#16215277) Homepage
    My buddy Don wrote that article. Actually, wrote it and continually updated it on their forum for the past 2 years until Tom's decided it was so valuable to the community that it warranted a full Tom's article. Many, many people, myself included, use that list to help them make a sound decision for a card in their price range.

    How can everyone criticize it so frivolously and heavily when all the thinking and research and careful consideration has been distilled down into a no-nonsense, 7 page go-to guide?
    • Slashdot is part of the Internet's Yin [wikipedia.org]. Look through the past stories and make a tally of how many ideas and gadgets are met with antipathy and disdain versus how many garner acclaim. You might be surprised.

      I only noticed this characteristic after something that I have some connection to was treated with the scorn-stick.

      Welcome to Slashdot. Leave your sensitivity at the door.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by shoolz ( 752000 )
        Agreed. I've been a /. reader since late '96, so I'm well used to it. Others, especially new users, not so much.

        I sent the triumphant mail to Don this morning to tell him he hit the front page, and he was crestfallen by all the poor behavior and negative remarks.

        Prior to today, he was only vaguely aware of /. and never read it. After today's treatment, I don't think he'll ever come back.
  • I just picked up the new XFX 7950GT. I know bang/buck isn't quite as good as a Radeon X1900XT, but I bought it for 2 reasons:

    1) Passive cooling! My overclocked gaming machine is now quiet enough to sleep beside.

    2) No catalyst control center. Good lord, what a horrible piece of crap software that thing is.

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