When it comes to picking up a graphics card, there are always going to be monetary concerns involved, but with a little guidance, you can do a lot better than just plumping for a well reviewed card that might turn out to have been a fair whack more expensive than something similar but lower cost. The fact is that, for most building a new PC, you can do a lot better than just picking up the cheapest card going and crossing your fingers.

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To the same end, most users won’t be too happy just dropping a their money on a mid-range card and hoping, but reading up on all of the various cards available takes time and time is, as they say, money. So, in an effort to save you both time and money (or money squared, if you’re following the maths here), we’ve decided that we’ll run a best graphics card for your money article listing one relatively low-end card, one in the mid-range and one high-end card that we’d recommend.

These won’t be the cards with the most blistering performance, nor will they necessarily be the cheapest, but they will offer an impressive amount of bang for your buck. So, without any further ado, let’s take a bit of a look at what cards you should be looking at if you’re thinking of building a new machine or just looking at upgrading a card.

Sapphire Radeon HD 4670:

When it comes to a card that’s very much a cheap-as-chips GPU but absolutely gets the job done, there’s not much to match Radeon’s HD 4670. It’s also won itself a raft of awards, which is always hard to argue with.

Click through to see our page for the Radeon HD 4670

It boasts the Metku.net Gold Award for great value, the OCC Gold award from OverClockersClub as well as the Driver Heaven “Best in Class” award, all of which it’s managed to pick up for being a solid piece of hardware at a very low price indeed. While it’s been compared with the similarly priced Nvidia 9600GT, perhaps the best breakdown of the HD 4670 in comparison comes from HardwareHeaven, which says of the two,

“Now, as you will know from another of our recent 4670 reviews the 9600GT offers higher level performance than this card but we feel that the 4670 Ultimate certainly compensates for that with a smaller PCB, lack of need for a power connector, a brilliant cooling solution and features such as HDMI and Blu-Ray video acceleration that make the card far more versatile.”

Of course, performance aside, the biggest reason for the Sapphire Radeon HD 4670’s popularity is its low price point. At €66.37 you can’t really go too far wrong when it comes to such a solid card. If you’re looking for value for money, then it’s among the best at this price.

Sapphire Radeon HD 5750:

Radeon’s HD 5750 manages to take the median point in our value-for-money roundup, weighing in at just under €130 and managing to provide some fairly impressive performance at that price-point.

Click through to see our page for the Radeon HD 5750

Moreover, as with the HD 4670 listed above, it’s managed to glean itself no shortage of accolades and praise. Indeed, it boasts a silver award from OverClockersClub, which described the card as having ‘massive overclocking’ potential and while we should point out here that overclocking does all kind of unpleasant things to your warranty, it’s well worth pointing out that capability for those who might be interested in overclocking.

It also won both a “Highly Recommended” and a “Best Value” award from Pro-Clockers, who described the card favourably, saying that,

“For someone on a modest budget who refuses to put their last dollar on a high cost GPU, the HD 5750 really should be something to consider. In our testing, the HD 5750 outperformed my cherished HD 4770. It was fairly inexpensive and it played every game I like to play …

Not only do you get great performance, but you get new features as well. We can’t forget Eyefinity. Multiple monitors rock.”

Given the generally positive reviews, almost all of which cite its strong performance to price ratio as a recommending feature, it’s not hard to recommend the HD 5750 to anyone looking to pick up a card for under €150 that’ll get the job done.

Sapphire’s Radeon HD 5750 is €127.61 and should see you very well looked after for the price.

2 x Radeon HD 4850s:

It’s a bit of a jump, but if you’re willing to splash out on something the far side of the €200 but want to get solid value out of your rig then you’d do very well to investigate the possibility of a solid Crossfire setup, rather than just going with one card…

Click through to see our page for the Radeon HD 4850

Asus’ Radeon HD 4850 comes highly recommended indeed, considering the price. Moreover, the fact that you can plug two of them into our machine and have them proceed happily, crunching through anything you happen to throw at them makes the purchase only more attractive. Still, everything about the card lends itself to being set up in Crossfire; as the folks from TrustedReviews point out,

“So, if you want a relatively small single slow, power efficient, yet fast graphics card, the ATI HD 4850 would certainly seem to fit the bill perfectly. If you want an extra performance boost, going for an overclocked card certainly seems to pay dividends as well…

Performance and power consumption are class leading and on every level it’s on par with the competition so all in all it gets a solid ‘Recommended.’”

It might seem a bit of a headache to get it all going, and you’re going to want to make sure you can afford the space in your case (both in terms of fitting in the cards themselves and in terms of cooling), but once you’ve got it all up and running you’ve got a nice, high-performance arrangement without paying through the nose for it, with the minor bonus of managing to keep it all a little failure resistant. If one card happens to die on you, you’ll be able to limp along on the other until you can have it all replaced.

This week, Asus’ Radeon HD 4850 will set you back €120.52 each, bringing the cost of a Crossfire setup to around the €241.04 mark, which isn’t too bad at all, considering the performance you’ll get out of that kind of an arrangement.

Sapphire Radeon HD 5850:

Still, for those looking for a single card that’ll deliver a solid performance to price ratio at around the same price point, you could do a lot worse than the Radeon HD 5850.

Click through to see our page for the Radeon HD 5850

It’s a relatively simple question for most, as to whether or not to plump for the single card or two smaller ones, but it was perhaps best summed up by Ryan from our RMA department, who said of the whole debate, “If you’re running an older system, you’ll probably be far better served by an SLI setup, given that you have the space and cooling to run it properly. Otherwise you run the risk of ending up in a situation where you’ve got one big, expensive card sitting in your machine, not using it properly…”

It’s a solid card, and one that should stand you well if you’re looking to splash out a little, make a bigger spend now and hold off on spending more money later on. Not quite a “budget” option, given its price, but certainly not so expensive as to be prohibitive.

As with the cards listed above, it’s also won an absolute raft of awards, including the Whisper Quiet Award from Bigbruin, the Top Rank award from Tweaknews, a Value Award from HardwareHeaven, and the relatively simply named “Good Hardware” from PureOverclock.

Sapphire’s Radeon HD 5850 weighs in at around €20 more than the Crossfire HD 4850s, at €259.90, still solid value for money though.