Reviewed on November 21, 2007Despite the usual caveats of an ever-fluctuating 3D market, for the moment, at least, ATI's new Radeon HD 3850 graphics card delivers the best bang-for-the buck in PC graphics hardware. Until now we haven't had an acceptable sub-$200 option for PC gaming this year. Thanks to AMD, now we do.TAGS:Radeon, DirectX, ATI Technologies, PCI Express, PCI, Nvidia GeForce, motherboard, card, video card, NVidia, games, PC
Reviewed on August 2, 2007If you're looking to build a home theater PC, we recommend ATI's Radeon HD 2600 XT as the midrange card to use, thanks to its nearly perfect HD video image and its no-fuss installation. But for 3D gaming, you'd be much better off looking for a good deal on a faster, older graphics card.TAGS:Radeon, ATI Technologies, NVidia, Nvidia GeForce, ATI Radeon, card, DirectX, video card, generation, 3D, games
Reviewed on February 21, 2008Maingear's Ephex combines aggressive overclocking and a refined sense of what gamers want in a high-end PC. Crysis remains a challenge for even a top-of-the-line PC like this one, but if you can get past that hitch (and the multi-thousand-dollar price tag), we'd recommend this system in a second.TAGS:Maingear, Crysis, Radeon, ATI Technologies, video card, hard drive, Intel, games, PC, Microsoft Windows
Reviewed on February 12, 2007No other 3D graphics card comes close to this bang for the buck, making the 320MB XFX GeForce 8800 GTS mostly an easy decision if you need a midrange upgrade. Nvidia still has to polish off its Vista software, and the sooner-or-later arrival of competing cards muddies the waters a bit, but if you need a midprice graphics card today, this should be your pick.TAGS:XFX Inc, Nvidia GeForce, Radeon, NVidia, card, clock speed, ATI Technologies, DirectX, video card, 3D, AMD, Microsoft Windows Vista, games, Microsoft Windows
Reviewed on July 27, 2006The Velocity Micro Raptor DCX delivers the fastest performance we've ever seen, thanks to an aggressively overclocked Core 2 Extreme CPU. Because its price is $1,000 above that of the competition, however, we can't help but feel as though Velocity is buying a championship. That and recent case innovations from other vendors prevent us from giving it a higher rating.TAGS:Velocity Micro, Intel Core 2 Duo, Radeon, Dell XPS, video card, NVidia, vendor, high-performance, chipset, Intel, hard drive, games, video, PC