« Return to: Top 10 Graphics Boards
| Rank | AGP board | Street price (11/20/01) | Overall rating | Image quality | Overall speed | Features rating | Comments |
| 1 | Best Buy Gainward CardExpert GeForce2 MX TwinView/Vivo Golden Sample | $119 | 95 | Very good | Good | Very good | FEATURES: NVidia GeForce2 MX-400 chip, 32MB of SDRAM, 350-MHz RAMDAC; S-Video-in and -out, composite-in and -out; software DVD player, video editing software. SUMMARY: Solid performance and image quality; can display to two analog monitors or to a monitor and a TV simultaneously. ( Oct 01) |
| 2 | Best Buy, New ATI Radeon 8500 | $299 | 94 | Very good | Very good | Outstanding | FEATURES: ATI Radeon 8500 chip, 64MB of DDR SDRAM, 400-MHz RAMDAC; dual-display support, DVI-out, S-Video-out, composite-out; software DVD player; game. SUMMARY: The driver installer automatically updates your PC to DirectX 8. Includes the game Half-Life: Counterstrike and many hardware extras. |
| 3 | MSI MX400 Pro-VT32S | $89 | 91 | Very good | Good | Good | FEATURES: NVidia GeForce2 MX-400 chip, 32MB of SDRAM, 350-MHz RAMDAC; S-Video-in and -out, composite-out; color-calibration utility, software DVD player, overclocking utilities. SUMMARY: Excellent value for casual gamers, but no bundled games. Produced a few glitches in some test games. ( Dec 01) |
| 4 | Asus AGP-V7100 Pro Pure 32MB | $89 | 88 | Very good | Good | Good | FEATURES: NVidia GeForce2 MX-400 chip, 32MB of SDRAM, 350-MHz RAMDAC; color-calibration utility, software DVD player, three games. SUMMARY: A generous game bundle, attractive images, and a low price make this model a great choice for casual gamers on a budget. ( Nov 01) |
| 5 | New Gainward CardExpert GeForce2 Ti/500 XP Vivo Golden Sample | $149 | 86 | Average | Very good | Very good | FEATURES: NVidia GeForce2 Ti chip, 64MB of DDR SDRAM, 350-MHz RAMDAC; S-Video-in and -out, composite-in and -out; software DVD player, overclocking and video editing utilities. SUMMARY: By default, installs in overclocked mode, though nonoverclocked installation is an option. |
| 6 | MSI MX400 Pro-TC64S | $100 | 83 | Good | Good | Good | FEATURES: NVidia GeForce2 MX-400 chip, 64MB of SDRAM, 350-MHz RAMDAC; S-Video-out; color-calibration utility, overclocking utility, software DVD player, one game. SUMMARY: Well priced, but the output was rather dark and lacked contrast in several of the games used in our tests. ( Oct 01) |
| 7 | Asus AGP-V7100 Pro TV 64MB | $105 | 83 | Good | Good | Good | FEATURES: NVidia GeForce2 MX-400 chip, 64MB of SDRAM, 350-MHz RAMDAC; S-Video-out, composite-out; color-calibration, overclocking utilities, software DVD player, two games. SUMMARY: 64MB of RAM lets it run games at high resolutions, but slowly. Includes Star Trek New Worlds and Messiah. ( Jan 02) |
| 8 | Matrox Millennium G550 | $125 | 83 | Good | Average | Very good | FEATURES: Matrox G550 chip, 32MB of DDR SDRAM, 360-MHz RAMDAC; dual-display support, DVI-out, S-Video-out, composite-out, HeadCasting support; software DVD player, color-calibration utility. SUMMARY: Bundled Digimask software lets you make a digitized version of your face to use in games. ( Jan 02) |
| 9 | New VisionTek Xtasy 6564 | $200 | 82 | Average | Very good | Good | FEATURES: NVidia GeForce3 Ti 200 chip, 64MB of DDR SDRAM, 350-MHz RAMDAC; S-Video-out; color-calibration software. SUMMARY: Autorun didn't work on the driver CD-ROM, so we had to install this card's drivers manually. Neck-and-neck with the number two card in speed, but lags in image quality. |
| 10 | New VisionTek Xtasy 5864 | $150 | 78 | Average | Very good | Average | FEATURES: NVidia GeForce2 Ti chip, 64MB of DDR SDRAM, 350-MHz RAMDAC; S-Video-out; color-calibration software. SUMMARY: Speed scores were near those of the fastest cards in all test resolutions except our highest (1600 by 1200). However, image-quality scores in Test Drive 6 were poor. |
How We Test: We test graphics boards under Windows Millennium Edition. Our performance scores are based on tests that we evaluate on frame rate (50 percent) and image quality (50 percent). We use GT Interactive's Unreal Tournament, Id Software's Quake III Arena, Interplay's MDK2 Demo, Infogrames' Test Drive 6, and the Caligari TrueSpace 4.2 Benchmark for both performance and image-quality testing. We test graphics boards in a Dell Dimension 4100 Series with a PIII-933 CPU and 128MB of PC133 SDRAM. To test each board, we use drivers supplied by the vendor. Overall rating is based on performance (42.5 percent), features (27.5 percent), price (20 percent), and support policies (10 percent). All boards are 4X AGP compatible unless otherwise noted. For more details, see "A Guide to PC World's Star Ratings."