Screenshots

Budget GPU 2013 photo gallery

Published Sunday, 20 January 2013

To kick off with the Ł70-100 GPUs, here we have Nvidia's GTX 650, which falls in line with the latest wave of DirectX 11 cards using the Kepler chipset.

The GTX 650 requires a single 6-pin PCIe connector to juice it, and with a peak draw of 65 watts, it counts as one of the most energy efficient cards in this price bracket. Three digital outputs are available: DVI-D, DVI-I and HDMI 1.4.

MSI's version of the GTX 650 raises the core clock to 1124MHz, up from the default 1058MHz. The bad news is the card doesn't offer a boost mode, so those clocks are locked.

AMD's Radeon HD 7770 stands in the opposite corner of the sub-Ł100 ring. This is based on new, more power efficient Cape Verde architecture, using a 28nm fabrication process like the Nvidia competitor.

Good news for multi-monitor users; while the HD 6770 skimped on its range of outputs, the 7770 reprises the DisplayPort, HDMI and two DVI-I ports of the 5770.

Both the HD 7770 and GTX 650 sport 1GB of GDDR5 – a bare prerequisite these days for running demanding DirectX 11 titles such as Battlefield 3 or Crysis 2 at 1080p.

Nvidia's GTX 650 Ti rounds out 2012's onslaught of Kepler graphics card releases, which started with the GTX 680. This latest model can be found for Ł120.

In its reference form, the GTX 650 Ti operates from a PCIe 2.0 pin set, and is the only card in review here to use a humble single slot configuration. This physically limits the outputs to one DVI-D, one DVI-I and one mini HDMI port.

Though its PCB is much smaller overall, the GTX 650 Ti aces the GTX 650 by offering 768 CUDA cores to its 384, doubling the texture units to 64, plus offering a marginally higher memory clock.

To compete in the higher Ł100-130 price bracket, we have the 1GB version of AMD's Radeon 7850.

At 19.5cm long, the AMD card is the longest of the four newcomers, and is also wide enough to require a dual-slot installation. Eyefinity users can hook up three monitors through its DisplayPort, DVI-I, and HDMI outputs.

The HD 7850 boasts a 28nm Pitcairn chipset, which helps reduce the peak TDP of the card. Surprisingly, only one 6-pin PCIe power supply is needed to juice it; an improvement over the HD 6870 which demanded two.

About Richard Leadbetter

Rich has been a games journalist since the days of 16-bit and specialises in technical analysis. Commonly known around Eurogamer as the Blacksmith of the Future.

Read more articles from Richard by visiting the Richard Leadbetter archive page.

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