Sub-$200 Video Card Roundup - April 2002

The Test

You'll notice that this roundup is done a bit differently from graphics roundups in the past. We benchmarked each card at three resolutions, 800x600, 1024x768 and 1280x1024. For those tests we used the fastest available Athlon XP CPU on an KT266A platform (2100+ on an EPoX 8KHA+). Obviously not everyone looking for a sub $200 video card will be running the absolute fastest Athlon XP processor so we benchmarked every card under every game at 1024x768 at 15 different clock speeds.

We kept the FSB speed and CPU architecture constant so we could accurately measure how the various cards scaled with CPU clock speed; while this does produce some unofficial CPU speeds (e.g. 800MHz/133MHz FSB Athlon XP), you can get a good idea of where your CPU will limit your performance with any of these cards.

At the end of each game benchmark section you'll find a CPU Scaling graph that depicts exactly what we've mentioned above. We spent countless days running the CPU scaling tests so we hope they come in handy for you.