Normally when you go for the low-end of the market you know what you’re in for. You’re looking for some cost savings or power savings by going with chips that aren’t as powerful as the more expensive options but still offer plenty of power for the mundane usage scenarios. There’s still room for tweaking though.

Legit Reviews is all over the EVGA GeForce GT 220 SSC DDR3 video card which chooses to go with DDR3 over the slower DDR2 and pushes clock rates a bit higher as well:

Today, we will be looking at the EVGA GeForce GT 220 SSC DDR3 edition graphics card. This card has a factory overclocked core and shader clock speeds, which should help boost performance over the standard clock speeds of 625MHz and 1360MHz.  The EVGA GeForce GT 220 SSC DDR3 has a core clock speed of 671MHz and a shader clock of 1458MHz. This is just over a 7% clock frequency boost on the GPU, so that should help out performance on the card’s 48 stream processors.

Overall its performance is still underwhelming in games but you don’t need much performance in your office or home theater PCs now do you.

If you were wondering when the latest, monthly, ATI Catalyst drivers would be released well you had a bit of a wait this month as AMD chose to push them out on Microsoft’s Windows 7 launch date. In the latest 9.10 driver set you can expect quite a few performance improvements and bug fixes as well as support for the newest ATI Radeon HD 5870 and 5850 graphics cards. Unfortunately Radeon HD 5770 and 5750 support didn’t make it in but those cards should see support shortly in the form of a hotfixed driver.

If you’re running a Radeon graphics card earlier than the Radeon HD 2400 series you’ll have to grab the company’s legacy drivers as earlier generations of their graphics chips have been moved to legacy support status.

Here are some quick links to AMD’s download pages:

ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows 7
ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows 7 64-bit
ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows Vista
ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows Vista 64-bit
ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows XP
ATI Catalyst 9.10 Video Drivers for Windows XP 64-bit

While the ATI Radeon HD 5770 presents a solid mid-range performance gaming experience there is that often overlooked benefit that a multiple GPU environment brings in. Thankfully there are those dedicated enough to test such technology.

Guru3D has tested the Radeon HD 5770 in a three card CrossFireX setup which may seem a bit excessive but the performance benefits are there:

Obviously rendering your games with three GPUs equals a lot of brute horsepower, so big that the rest of the PC might become a bottleneck for your graphics solution. That is however a luxury problem though but as an example, Fallout 3 at 8x AA at 1920×1200 performed as well as a 2-way 5770 setup as the processor (Core i7 @ 3.75 GHz) was literally holding back the GPUs from reaching the stratosphere.

When your gaming performance is held back by such a powerful processor it’s a good problem to have.

The mid-range isn’t the mid-range you remember, it’s now what used to be last generation’s high-end, performance-wise at least. It’s all a little confusing but given the price/performance ratios offered by these new products it’s not hard to figure out why an upgrade is so tempting.

Rage3D has a look at the Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 graphics card and its DirectX 11 supporting ways. It’s no 5870 but it’s sure to handle most of your budget gaming needs:

In some circumstances the HD5770 outperforms the HD4870, thanks to a high engine clock and plenty of GDDR5, and in others the reduced memory bandwidth shows itself; but really this card is the average gamers hero, offering HD gaming performance, Eyefinity, Dx11 and more as well as great HTPC features.

Intriguing to say the least. Budget based CrossFire anyone?

Nvidia may be having a tough time coming up with a high end alternative to the competitions products but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other areas to attack them on.

techPowerUp has a look at the Zotac GeForce GT 220 graphics card which sports a purpose built design to keep power usage down:

What it is made for is desktop use. The power consumption in idle is an amazing 10W which will help save you some money, especially if you are running a whole office full of computers. Feature wise everything you need is there, the lack of DirectX 11 doesn’t seem to be that important considering you won’t be enjoying many games on these cards and as NVIDIA told us for years, DirectX 10.1 is useless anyway. I really like the switch away from S-Video output to native HDMI on recent cards. It will help with the widespread adoption of media PCs to play back content on HD TVs.

It’s not for the gamers out there but should fill in those office and HTPC duties quite well.

As is customary with most technology the best revisions and refinements usually come around at the end of a product’s life, this time around is no different. The XFX Radeon HD 4890 Extreme sports a mild factory stock overclock and, with a bit of prodding, may just hit those high speeds you desire.

HardOCP has a review:

Taking it a step further to see just how much farther we could get, we increased the fan speed from auto to manual and set it at 100%. With this, we ended up with a fantastic clock speed 990MHz on the GPU and 4.68GHz on the memory without any voltage modifications!

Speedy, but you may want to save up a bit more and go for the latest and greatest.

The graphics battle kicks into high gear again with today’s launch of AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics card. Of course you can expect the usual performance improvements but the chip also sports new power saving features that should tame it when it’s just sitting around idling.

Here’s a collection of links testing the new board:

AMD’s Radeon HD 5870: Bringing About the Next Generation Of GPUs – AnandTech
ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB Review – bit-tech
AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 5870 Video Card Review – HardOCP
AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870: Unquestionably Number One – Hot Hardware
ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB Graphics Card and AMD Eyefinity Review – PC Perspective
AMD’s Radeon HD 5870 graphics processor – The Tech Report

In cooling silence is a completely relative term. What may seem whisper quiet to someone is annoyingly loud to someone else. There is of course a way to get complete silence but it used to mean setting your performance sights low.

Testseek has a review of the Gigabyte Radeon HD 4850 SilentCell 1GB graphics card and its completely silent and fan-less cooler that’s perfect for your next HTPC build:

Another outstanding feature of this card is its PCB, which is built upon the “Ultra Durable VGA” principles. The UDV technology uses almost double the normal amount of copper, which helps better lead the electricity and also improves on the cooling and general stability of the card. On the PCB we also find the 6 pin PCI-E  power connector and the connector for CrossFire mode.

A nice looking card but you’re going to want some decent airflow over it in order to keep it cooled off.

Gaming laptops have typically come in one form: large and obnoxious looking. As well as they perform sometimes you just don’t want to proclaim your tendency to game to the general public, not that you could as they’re more like desktop replacements than actual portable machines.

Dell has taken things down a notch with their Studio XPS 16 notebook, offering up a more palatable set of color schemes making for a sensible looking machine. HotHardware has a review:

In fact, the machine looks so good that it’s easy to forget that it’s not exactly the thinnest or lightest machine on the block. Now, it’s certainly nimble enough for most, and we’re actually impressed with the overall look and feel considering its screen size. Also, the added room enabled Dell to install a full-size keyboard, more powerful speakers, a 1080p panel and a potent 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon 4670 GPU, which is admittedly the star of the system.

A nice machine but, for the price, they could toss in a battery that actually lasted a decent amount of time.

High end graphics cards usually come with a stock cooler design that is capable of handling the sort of heat the monsters put out, unfortunately they only do enough to maintain GPUs at a safe operating temperature.

Hardware Canucks has a look at the Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 2GB Vapor-X video card. It sports an insanely beefy cooling system that should keep things a bit quiet and running cooler:

Sapphire’s HD 4890 2GB Vapor-X has a unique design with a partial-length heatsink covering the area directly above the core and making its way towards the backplate. Meanwhile, the rear portion of the card has a separate heatsink which is used to cool off the hot running VRMs. Its blue PCB makes the whole affair look faintly Gigabyte-esque while the length sticks to the reference 9.5”.

Beefy and svelte, interesting combination they have going on there.