Video Cards

Video Card Reviews

Sparkle GTS450 Video Card Review

December 9, 2010
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Hi Everyone, today we are taking a look at the GTS 450 from the guys at Sparkle Computer Corp. Now for those who don’t know Sparkle has been around since 1982 in Taiwan, making them well known around the globe and for slightly over a year now, they are beginning to leave their mark in the USA. Now what I like about Sparkle is the fact that they can keep their prices low on most their products and they have 2 different lines to choose from.

Their standard Graphics card lines which follow NVIDIA’s naming rule and then their Calibre performance lines which has more upgraded cooling as well as better clock setting for the GPU. Now the cards we received today are part of their standard line but has a few modifications compared to other vendors who tend to use NVIDIA’s stock coolers. Now the GTS 450 is NVIDIA’s lowest price Fermi card to date with performance and is focused directly at gamers on a budget.

 

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Sparkle Computer Corp GeForce GT240 512MB GDDR5 w/ Native HDMI Port Review

May 9, 2010
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Today for review I’ve got a video card from Sparkle Computer Corp, it’s an Nvidia based GT240 that has 512MB of ram built-in. With those specs I’m sure you can guess it’s not really a card you’d want for gaming, but it has it’s place nonetheless. It does feature a native HDMI port, along with both VGA and DVI ports on it, so no adapter needed for HDMI which is nice. The card is also rather inexpensive and virtually silent, it would make a good choice for an HTPC I’m sure. So read on…


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Calibre X260 Nvidia GeForce GTX260 896MB Video Card Review

September 20, 2009
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For those of us that play video games and watch HD content on our computers, video cards are very important to us, we need the best performing we can get. I’ve been using a Diamond Radeon 4870 with 1gig of ram for a little while now, and I was under the impressions that it was a rather high end video card, the thing cost like $400 when I got it after all. If you compare Nvidia and ATI cards, the 4870 was the flagship card, now of course the 4890 is, but one would think that the 4870 was still a decent card to have. If you look at the Nvidia end of things the GTX295 is the highest, then the GTX285, then the GTX275 then the GTX260. Looking at that we see four versions, each with varying levels of performance and you would think that with the numbering, common sense would say that the 4890 is equal to the GTX295, and then the 4870 should be equal to the GTX285 right? Common sense gets thrown out the window though when it comes to VGA model numbers as we all know. Still though you would think that something like the 4870 would easily outperform a GTX260, if you though that you’d be wrong, very wrong, and yes I was wrong as well. The whole numbering system with CPUs and GPUs is something for a rant for another time though…

Up on the review block today I’ve got the Calibre X260 Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 896MB Overclocked Video Card and I can say that for a somewhat low priced card this thing rocks. Before I got the GTX260 for review I was using an ATI 4870 with 1 gig of ram, and I’m truly surprised that the GTX260 with less ram and lower clock speed easily bests it in terms of performance. The 4870 runs 1 gig of DDR5 ram and the GTX260 runs 896Mb of DDR3 ram, you’d think the 4870 would perform better, but you’d be wrong. I’ve put the GTX260 up against my 4870 and a GTS250 for comparison, so read on to learn about a very good video card…

 

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ECS Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 PCIE 1024MB DDR3 Video Card NGTS250-1GMU-F Review

July 5, 2009
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It’s been along time since I’ve been on the green side of things, or the Nvidia side, I’ve been with the red team, ATI, for a while now so it was nice to get this Nvidia GeForce GTS250 to play with. Video cards play a big role in our computers now, not just for video games, but for physics rendering, folding and even video processing or encoding with compatible programs, so they’ve become much more than something that puts the video on our screens. With all of the tings they can do now, it’s a wonder why budget cards, or cards with low memory are even on the market, then again, not everyone takes advantage of these features and some people just want to play games or watch videos. 

A little bit ago I took a look at the Diamond ATI Radeon 4870 1gig video card, a higher end card for sure, today though I’ve got the other side of things, an Nvidia GTS 250 from ECS Elitegroup. It’s totally the other side of things, it costs about half as much and it’s from a different company, still though I was curious as to how it would perform against my current 4870. So read on to see how they compare, you might be a bit surprised as I was...

 

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DIAMOND ATI Radeon HD 4870 PCIE 1024MB GDDR5 Video Card 4870PE51G Review

May 27, 2009
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DIAMOND ATI Radeon HD 4870 PCIE 1024MB GDDR5 Video Card 4870PE51G

 

Videocards are something that have
always kind of annoyed me, it seems they’re always releasing a new
one, technology that was hot a few months ago is now obsolete. Then
again, that’s the way it is with most technology so I’m not sure why
it surprises me, but it, the upgrades, just seems to go much faster
with video cards.

Today for review I’ve got the Diamond
ATI Radeon 4870 1gig video card. As you can see be the name it
features 1 gig of ram, so I figured why not make this more of a
comparison review as in how much performance do you gain when going
from 512mb to 1gig of ram. So I put my Sapphire 4870 512mb card up
against the Diamond, both are running the same core and memory
speeds, so they’re pretty much the same cards except for the on board
ram they have. So read one to find out if it’s worth it to grab the
1gig over the 512mb version card…

 

 

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EVGA e-GeForce 8600GTS 256MB 256-P2-N761-AR Video Card Review

January 8, 2008
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So with the latest bunch of game releases are you noticing that your system just isn’t quite up to the task of playing these games? Is the new 8800 line of video cards just not in your budget, but yet you still need to upgrade to something better? There are budget cards out there that are very capable of running the latest games in DX9 and DX10, of course you’re not going to max the video settings but the games still look great.

I’ve got two EVGA 8600GTS video cards for review today, not quite a budget card but they won’t set you back too much either. They’re quite capable of playing the latest games like Crysis, Gears of War and COD4: Modern Warfare very comfortably and I think most people would be very happy with them. Sure I’d like to own a couple 8800s but it’s not in my budget, so I get what I can afford, cheap but not too cheap! I still like to be able to play games and have them look nice as well.

I went with these specific cards mainly because of the DDR3 that is on them, there are other cards at this price point but not many that have the DDR3 memory. I shopped around quite a bit and did a lot of research before buying them. Originally when I was upgrading my system with the EVGA motherboard I was sort of set on getting the EVGA video cards as well to make it sort of a matched set, but there were others of the same model that were cheaper and I was considering getting those, but in the end after my research I finally decided that the EVGA 8600GTS offered the best bang for the buck.

So continue to see the results of my testing with DX9 and DX10 games and to see if these cards are worth your money or not…

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Biostar 7600GS PCIE Videocard Review

November 17, 2006
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With the launch of the Nvidia 8800 series of video cards, all other cards seem obsolete, but this is how it always happens, technology advances and those without the cash are left to make due with what they can. If you don’t have the cash to throw down on an 8800 series vid card, there are still many other options available out there, even the so-called budget cards are still very good for what they are. Today for review I have the Biostar 7600GS video card, it is a lower end card for the gamer on a budget, but still plays games and has some nice features including a very low price point, you can run two of them is SLI mode for about $200. Read on to check it out…

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