Holiday 2006 Shopping Guide: GPUs

Entry Level GPUs

The next step up from the budget GPUs is going to be the Entry Level category, with prices ranging from $75-$125. You will also see more expensive versions of the Ultra Budget graphics cards, either due to extra features, factory overclocking, or even the manufacturer's name. We're going to focus primarily on the new GPUs that become available with the increased budget, rather than continuing to mention slightly faster clocked versions of the Ultra Budget offerings.


At the lower end of this price range, ATI has the X1300 XT, which is simply a renamed version of the X1600 Pro. Right now the X1600 Pro (128bit version) is slightly cheaper, but that will likely change in the future. Driver optimizations since the launch of the X1600 Pro have improved performance quite a bit, but in reality the card isn't a whole lot faster than the GeForce 6600 GT cards, which are really quite outdated these days. Certain titles will prefer ATI hardware, but in terms of value in we would definitely take the cheaper 7300 GT cards over the X1600 Pro/X1300 XT.


The X1600 XT is better, with clock speeds that are quite a bit higher - the X1650 Pro is practically the same, coming with a negligible 10/20 MHz increase on the GPU/memory - but despite the more impressive sounding specifications the X1600 XT is really only slightly faster than the GeForce 7600 GS. At the top of the price spectrum, the least expensive GeForce 7600 GT cards are definitely the best way to go. Prices currently start at about $130, but you can find $20 mail-in rebates on the EVGA cards that drop the final price down to $110. Even without the rebate, we would still recommend spending the extra money to get a 7600 GT over any of the other cards at the top of this price bracket - at least if graphics performance is important to you.


The AGP market continues to be relatively unimpressive, with prices that are typically $20 more than the equivalent PCI-E graphics cards - at least where cards are available on both platforms, which isn't all that common. GeForce 7600 GS cards might be worth a thought at the top end, along with the X1600 Pro and X1300 Pro ATI models. Perhaps because demand for AGP cards is really starting to diminish, there are currently a lot of mail-in rebates available that might make some of the AGP cards worth considering as a final upgrade. Keep in mind that everything short of a 7600 GT is usually going to be slower than something like a GeForce 6800 GT/GS card (or X800 Pro), so if you already have such a card it might not be worth upgrading to anything faster.

As we did with the Ultra Budget GPUs, here is a quick breakdown of the features and specifications of the various Entry Level GPUs we've mentioned. Again, we have sorted the table roughly in order of increasing performance. When you consider the clock speeds of the 7600 GS, it really is surprising that the much higher clocked X1600 XT isn't able to outperform it by a large margin - which is of course why ATI went back to the drawing board and created the X1650 XT, but more on that when we get to the Midrange GPUs on the next page.

Entry Level GPUs
GPU	Pixel Shaders	Vertex Shaders	ROPs	Core Speed	RAM Speed	Memory Interface	Price
X1300 XT	12	5	4	500	800	128bit	$108
X1600 Pro	12	5	4	500	800	128bit	$91
6600 GT	8	3	4	500	1000	128bit	$85*
X1600 XT	12	5	4	590	1380	128bit	$119
X1650 Pro	12	5	4	600	1400	128bit	$105
7600 GS	12	5	8	400	700	128bit	$109
7600 GT	12	5	8	560	1400	128bit	$135