Best Video Card For $150

The video card industry has also suffered in 2011 because of the hard drive shortage, but fortunately this didn't hold back development and the two largest graphics processor manufacturers continue to release improved products every month. At this moment AMD has a slight edge over nVidia, as it was already able to release its 28nm graphics chips, offering never seen performance level and efficiency in the high-end video card market.

Users who have hundreds of dollars to spend will most likely purchase these new high-end AMD Radeon 7950/7970 video cards, while others on a smaller budget should consider a video card with a price tag around $150.

There are two video card models selling for $149.99 at newegg.com. One is the nVidia Geforce GTX 460 with 1GB GDDR5 memory and the other one is from AMD, the Radeon 6850, also equipped with 1GB of GDDR5 memory. Although their performance is very similar, these two cards have major structural differences. For one the memory bus is only 192-bit on the nVidia card, while the AMD Radeon 6850 video card uses 256 bits to address the on-board memory. Parallel processing is also handled in different ways by these two contenders, as the nVidia card runs 336 processing (CUDA) cores at a 1.6GHz frequency, while the AMD card features 960 stream processors at the GPU's original 775MHz speed. Until now there wasn't any conclusive proof that one approach would be much better, but upcoming nVidia video cards will feature more processing cores, running at the original GPU speed, just like the AMD cards. This could only mean that in fact the AMD architecture proved to be the best.

If I had to choose between the nVidia GTX 460 and the Radeon 6850 video card today, I would definitely go with the AMD solution, as it features a highly efficient graphics processor, even if it's slightly slower that its Radeon 5850 predecessor. AMD video cards also feature the AMD Eyefinity technology, which allows you to connect up to 6 monitors to just one video card, without having to buy special video port splitters. Most AMD Radeon 6850 video card come with at least 4 or 5 digital output ports, so you'll only need one or two passive port splitters for 6 displays.

Using more video cards in one gaming system is not an issue with either nVidia or AMD video cards, but you have to verify if the motherboard supports AMD Crossfire, nVidia SLI or both, before making the purchase. Future motherboards will most likely support any kind of video card stacking, as there's no real hardware requirement for it, just a few lines of BIOS code is necessary. There are also a couple of software suites released, which can use any video cards you install into a system, even if they are from different manufacturers and different categories. This software solution simply divides up 3D processing tasks to all participants, according to their capabilities. The monitor on which the image is displayed can even be connected to the on-boar graphics port, just like with nVidia's mobile Optimus technology.

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