Today we have a look at some of the new range of cut-price video cards from nVidia and ATI, namely the Radeon HD 2400Pro, 2400XT and the GeForce 8400GS, all of which will set you back around AU$100 or less, we see which performs the best.

The budget graphics card market is huge, and while there will always be a demand from those who want the latest and greatest for the top end of the market, the lower end of the market is controlled by those who just want a basic PC or Home Theatre PC but still want something better than the standard on-board video, which will generally gives very poor 3D performance. The addition of a 3D video card, even a basic one like the ones we’re looking at today can give a massive boost to the computer’s abilities for 3D performance and even video playback, especially in HD.

The cards we’re looking at today are the ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro and 2400XT, both from XpertVision, and the nVidia GeForce 8400GS from Inno3D. All three cards are DirectX 10 compatible and all three have a standard VGA (D-Sub) output and a DVI output and all are connected via the PCI-Express x16 interface. The basic specs of the cards are as follows:

GeForce 8400GS:

• Cost: Approx - AU$80.00
• Memory: 256MB GDDR2
• Memory Frequency: 800 MHz
• Memory Bus: 64-Bit
• Core Frequency: 450 MHz
• Stream Processors: 16

Radeon HD 2400 Pro:

• Cost: Approx – AU$75.00
• Memory: 256MB DDR2
• Memory Frequency: 800 MHz
• Memory Bus: 64-Bit
• Core Frequency: 600 MHz
• Stream Processors: 40

Radeon HD 2400 XT:

• Cost: Approx - AU$100.00
• Memory: 256MB GDDR3
• Memory Frequency: 1.5 GHz
• Memory Bus: 64-Bit
• Core Frequency: 700 MHz
• Stream Processors: 40

By all accounts, both the Radeon cards have the GeForce 8400GS seriously outgunned with significantly faster core speeds and better/faster memory configurations, the Radeon cards also have ATI’s HyperMemory system which allows the cards to use system memory to supplement what it already has onboard, up to a size of 1GB, 256MB is included as standard with the Radeon HD 2400s, which for most instances is still more than enough. nVidia’s version of this technology – TurboCache – is not present on any of the GeForce 8 Series of cards.

The ATI Radeon HD 2400 series of cards also supports ATI’s Crossfire (Multi-GPU) technology, even though the particular cards we have today are devoid of the crossfire bridge connector. There is no support for nVidia’s SLI technology in the GeForce 8400 range. All the cards we’re looking at today support HDTV and have the ability to support HDCP, and although it is an option on all of them it is still a welcome inclusion if you’re going to be using these cards in a Home Theatre environment.

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