Graphics cards

We feel somewhat conflicted about recommending a $600 graphics card, but for a small niche of buyers, Gigabyte's GV-N580SO-15I does actually make sense. True, it costs almost twice as much as a more-than-acceptable mid-range card, and if you’re using a 1080p monitor (or smaller), that extra money spent won’t substantially improve your gaming experience. But for those who have splashed out on a big, high-resolution screen, this substantially overclocked Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 does deliver.

Another month, another batch of mid-range graphics cards are launched. For most gamers, a mid-range card provides the performance you need at around half the price of a high-end card, so it's hardly surprising it's a popular and crowded market. Here, we've reviewed three new cards: An AMD Radeon HD 6950 model from MSI, and two Nvidia GTX 560 cards from ASUS and Palit, the first we've seen from the latter vendor for some time.

Asking A$350 for an AMD Radeon HD 6950 model with a mere 50MHz overclock is pretty brave, especially when a standard 6950 graphics card can be had for as little as A$270 online. To be fair, the MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III Power Edition/OC offers additional voltage regulation hardware and a substantial overclock to be had if you’re willing to mess around with clock speeds, voltages and so forth. But at the same time, there’s no actual guarantee of additional performance and for the extra $80, we’d want a performance increase out of the box.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a graphics card from Palit, which makes this GeForce GTX 560 Ti a little bit of a let-down. Despite having double the usual amount of memory in a GTX 560 card, and a price premium, there’s little additional performance on offer here.

We’re actually a little surprised by the ASUS ENGTX560 DirectCU II TOP. Despite a fairly aggressive factory overclock and a not-too-steep price hike, this mid-range card struggles to separate itself from the pack of mid-range GeForce GTX 560 graphics cards. Then again, with most vendors eschewing the GTX 560’s stock speeds for some degree of factory overclocking (this is one GPU that’s especially hard to find in its standard guise), perhaps that’s what we should have expected.

Nvidia has smoothed out the kinks in its production of DirectX 11 graphics cards since its, er, ‘troubled’ launch last year. Where previously, clock speeds were limited by high power draw, voltage leaks and yield problems from the then-new 40nm production process, this has gradually been fixed as Nvidia’s range has matured. Enough so that the new GTX 560 — essentially a rebadge of last year’s GTX 460 1GB but made with updated production technology — is actually pretty compelling. Speeds are up by about 20% (at least for core clocks) above the 460.

Budget graphics cards are rarely very compelling at launch. That's because it's a crowded market with new cards competing with more powerful previous-generation gear that vendors are trying to flog off cheap. To see if this still holds true, we tested four new cards under $150 — AMD's Radeon HD 6570, Radeon HD 6670 and Radeon HD 6450, and Nvidia's GeForce GT 520 — and put them up against discounted older cards, the AMD Radeon HD 5770 and Nvidia GeForce GT 430.

The AMD Radeon HD 6570 is one of the better examples of a new budget graphics card. It's falls well short of the Radeon HD 6850, of course, or even the aging Radeon HD 5770, but taken in isolation, this half-height budget card is a decent performer. It's not really up to more intense shooters like Crysis or Aliens vs. Predator, where it struggles to clear 30fps at anything but the lowest resolutions, but for Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3) engine games and even DiRT 2, a DirectX 11 title, it's actually more than adequate, which seems about right to us for a bit of casual gaming.

The Radeon HD 6670 is a small step up from the HD 6570, offering twice the onboard memory and slightly higher clock speeds, but otherwise identical space. In practice, this translates to slightly more compelling performance in our more demanding benchmarks (rendering Crysis playable, barely, at 1,680 x 1,050 pixels). In fact it's the best performing of the new budget cards, but you'll pay around $120. That's around the same as the Radeon HD 5770, but the HD 6670 is far from a performance match for AMD's older card.

We often encourage vendors to send us their custom variants of AMD and Nvidia’s GPUs. Custom designs can offer advantages over reference cards in terms of noise, cooling and speed, potentially making them more attractive buys. We rarely receive something as out-there as this ASUS GeForce GTX 570, though. With a massive triple-slot heat shroud, assuming your case can accommodate its gargantuan proportions, it’s actually a pretty compelling purchase.