Sub-$200 Video Card Roundup - April 2002

Final Words

If it isn't clear by now this should help considerably, NVIDIA's GeForce4 Ti 4200 is by far the best card under the $200 mark for those purchasing in the very near future. It does very well against ATI's Radeon 8500LE and manages to perform well even on slower CPUs. Our CPU scaling charts can help you pick out exactly what would offer you the best bang for your buck depending on your CPU speed but in most situations you'll get very good performance out of the Ti 4200.

Provided that availability isn't an issue, the 128MB GeForce4 Ti 4200 cards should be sought after instead of the 64MB cards. While you should be able to overclock the 128MB cards to the 64MB speeds, you can never add additional memory to a 64MB card which will hurt you down the road. We are already seeing that in some of our tests today and games will only become even more demanding on memory sizes going forward.

Let us not forget about the Radeon 8500LE however as it is the primary reason that we have the GeForce4 Ti 4200 today. If it weren't for the Radeon 8500LE we would be left with a DX7 compliant GeForce4 MX to tend to the mainstream market. Unfortunately for ATI, the card that was designed to put the GeForce4 MX to shame ended up resulting in the pending release of the Ti 4200 which is a bit more than the 8500LE can offer.

This is the perfect example of where competition truly brings us better choices in a market, it'll be interesting to see what happens if a capable third manufacturer returns to the scene. With DirectX 9 on the horizon the major hardware firms are diligently at work on their next-generation GPUs, from R300 to NV30 to something else being shown now behind closed doors - as usual, the graphics market always keeps us busy. Stay tuned.