New value graphics card champion

For the last couple of years or so, I've been installing AMD Radeon HD5450 graphics cards in family desktops so that basic games such as World of Warcraft, The Sims or Flight Simulator can be played. These cards also improve video playback, have a low power rating without additional connections, are silent (without noisy, little fans), can be adjusted to low profile cases and are fairly cheap to purchase, though the average price is increasing from £20 to £30 in that time.

I've occasionally purchased and tested similar cards such as Radeon HD6450 with DDR3 and DDR5, nVidia GT610, etc. The performance increase was generally not worth the extra cost. This week I saw an nVidia GT730 with 1GB DDR3 going for just £34 so I decided to try that. It is a short, PCIe 8-lanes card with a basic dual slot width heat-sink. Testing it shows that it doubles the PCmark7 score and trebles the 3Dmark06 figure. Yes, I know these benchmarks are old but it saves me re-benchmarking old cards and systems. And the games are old too. An impressive result and I'm sure that I will be purchasing more of these little video wonders.

Also, for a bit more money at about £60 I can get an nVidia GT640 with DDR5 and 128-bit memory bandwidth, so I will probably get one of these to see if the performance improvement is worth the extra cost. It should be.