Best budget graphics card for WoW?

[sidewinder]

My girlfriend's dad went away for a few months and the one thing he asked me to do was to find him a new graphics card for his PC...which I still havent done and he's back in a few weeks...

 

Don't do any PC gaming myself so I'm well out of the loop. He doesn't want to spend more than about £50, and he mainly plays WoW, some other games but not usually anything too taxing.

 

I'd have to take a look at his PC to see exactly what he currently has, but it's decent, Quad Core Xeon, 3GB RAM, beefy PSU. He had a really expensive card before which completely died, hence why I think he's reluctant to spend too much

[Flakes]

Pretty much anything will play WoW, a mid range card could play it full settings when WoW first came out, so now you could probably buy any bottom of the range ATI or Nvidia Card. Cant make a recomendation myself as i havent been in the market for a new GPU since i bought my 8800GTX (due to consoles knobbling graphics ive never found a game i cant run on full settings)

[AMLinington]

Only problem with buying a low end card is that as WoW is patched and expansion-packed the minimum requirements go up and up. I bought a Radeon 4770 a while back and WoW plays fine on that at between 20 and 60 fps on medium graphics settings. Foolishly thinking that it is quite old I googled the 4770 and it's still priced at £85! My partner recently bought a lovely beefy Radeon 5830 for £83 too and it's fantastic - huge but fantastic!

 

Unfortunately from what I can see from benchmarking etc The Radeon Cards have a better performance/value ratio - the NVIDIA tend to be very pricy and for the same cost you can get a ridiculously high specced Radeon that performs about a 1000 times better. Take a look at the high end graph on PassMark Software - Video Card Benchmark Charts to get an idea of the kinds of cards you're looking at. Have a look at where the Radeon 4770 is on that list and look at the 5830 knowing that both of these retail at £85 - you could perhaps look at the Radeon 5670 Asus do a 5670 for £54.99 Asus ATI Radeon 5670 HD 775MHz 1GB PCI-Express 2.1 HDMI (EAH5670/DI/1GD3) - dabs.com I tend to prefer XFX but they are quite pricy. Then again all my XFX have been really good cards. But I'm sure someone will reply and say 'NOOOOOOOOO XFX ARE CRAP!' - everyone has different experiences of the brands. Generally I tend to look at Asus, Gigabyte, XFX and PNY. I don't know what Sapphire are like as a brand but if you've never heard of the brand I'd probably steer clear - especially the budget brands.

 

A.

Edited May 12, 2011 by AMLinington
Wording

[Falshire]

The graphics for wow used a very old proprietary engine which is being updated in stages with each major add-on release.

I have in the past (2 years ago) played WoW,graphics ramped up fully on an old XFX4650 this was in combo with a Intel E4400.

But you need a much better card than that for at least some future proofing.

 

Ebuyer is agood place to check out graphics cards as well as dabs.Cheap Laptops, Computers and Cheap LCD TVs | Ebuyer.com

 

 

XFX HD 5670 1GB SDDR3 DVI HDMI DP Out PCI-E Graphics Card | Ebuyer.com

Edited May 12, 2011 by Falshire

[somabc]

If funds are limited I would buy this one. It will WoW no problems.

 

XFX HD 5450 650MHz 512MB DDR3 HDMI DVI VGA PCI-E.. | Ebuyer.com

[3s-gtech]

I wouldn't touch a 5450 personally for gaming, it's far too cut down - but the 6570 is a decent card, and the 5570 is the same but a little slower. Lots of recent reviews of these, and they're cheap.

[AMLinington]

I looked at getting the 5450 and read some reviews online that said performance was very poor. I would avoid the 5450 too. If money is tight you will definitely get a better value/performance ratio out of a Radeon card - more for your money! I found that benchmarking site really useful for comparisons when sourcing the new Gfx card for my partner - I was able to shortlist several in my budget range, check their reviews and check their benchmarks. Ultimately you will always end up having to compromise price over performance but you can make sure you spend your £50 on the best possible card for the money. Edited May 12, 2011 by AMLinington
Spelling

[3s-gtech]

Fraction over budget Sapphire HD6570 HM PCI-E HDMI / DVI-D / VGA W/ 512M.. | Ebuyer.com (GDDR5 models are faster, despite smaller frame buffer)

In budget Sapphire HD 5570 1GB DDR3 DVI VGA DisplayPort PCI-E.. | Ebuyer.com