What card have you recently installed, expecting nowt.. and then being nicely suprised by it's performance?
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What card have you recently installed, expecting nowt.. and then being nicely suprised by it's performance?
Not a graphics card as such, but I was surprised by how well the GMA3000 (or whatever it's marketing name is) in the Intel 965 Express chipset in my laptop handled Neverwinter Nights - playable @ 1280x768 even when I'd turned pretty much all the eye candy on!). I'm also looking forward to getting my 8400GS up and running and seeing how that performs...
The HD 3650 i brought from transylvanic is a surprisingly good card. Can still play CoD MW2 perfectly well on it. :)
My HD4830 which I got off Ebay for around £50 a year ago. AFAIK it look like it was brand new and I have been able to play many recent games at 1440X900 and 1680X1050 using decent settings under XP,Vista and Windows 7.
I refuse to believe that a graphics card could surprise you :p
I'm surprised I'm still using my Radeon 9550! Oh, the pile of games I'm still working my way through before I'm *allowed* to build a new computer....sigh! :)
I'm surprised how little I use my GTX 285... but tbh I only bought it because it was mispriced
I'm surprised that the 7300LE in my MythTV box has decided that with Ubuntu 10.04 and the latest Nvidia drivers, it can do 1080p50 output, whereas just a few months ago it would frameskip like a bitch.
The longevity of that system as a whole is quite remarkable.
I'm seeing a trend here...
Two years ago I paid £50 for a 4670, definitely been impressed with how its aged in my media PC for occasional MMOing.
lol, that was the best single slot graphics card I could find when I built my wife's Shuttle. She raids in WoW on her 4760 as her main machine :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Champman99
Good trick, consider it was only released 18 months ago ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Champman99
Of course, the thing with the 4670 is that it's still best graphics card you can buy for < £60...
hmm... we're not really helping the Hardware Dept sell much kit are we ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve
Apologies, when I was posting just did a gmail archive search for 4670 and checked the invoice, came up on the invoice as 12/03/08 but now of course I realise the invoice was using a system of MM/DD/YY :)Quote:
Originally Posted by scaryjim
Anyway not sure 4670 counts as a bargain - but considering I usually spend alot more on graphics card I was pleasantly suprised with the performance it offered. Turned those cheap "office" type builds using X2's and AMD chipsets into a viable little gaming system for ~250 all in.
I was fairly impressed with the HD3200 onboard of my parent's laptop last year. The fact it could get Left4Dead running at a playable framerate at all was a very pleasant surprise for a £390 laptop.
AMD Turion X2 2.1Ghz / 4Gb RAM / HD3200, Left4Dead was playable at about 30-35 fps on low/med details @ 1024 x 600 or something around that.
The X2300 in my laptop can play Sins of a Solar Empire on full detail, which I was very happy about.
Couple this with a projector, keyboard and mouse, you got yourself a nice mobile LAN setup :)