We've already rounded up the best sub-£100 graphics cards, and now it's onto the sub-£200 pixel workhorses. It's a different kettle of microchips entirely, and it's in this price bracket that you start to see the kind of GPUs that offer serious gaming performance.
Both Nvidia and AMD have cards in this price bracket, and they both put up quite a fight.
It's harder to find different chipsets in this price range than it is under £100, so we've taken the ones we've reviewed recently and looked at the various flavours manufacturers sell them in. The cards are all presented in price order.
There's a great amount of variety in there, and if you're looking to build a cheap computer capable of running Crysis in the highest settings, you've come to the right place.
1. XFX Radeon HD 4890 - £110
It may lack DirectX 11 support, but the HD 4890 is still a killer card, and it performed better than both the 5770 and 5830 graphics cards. Our chief complaint when we reviewed it was the price, but it's now available for just £110. Add to this AMD's proven, bullet-proof architecture - it'll run Crysis in maximum settings - and you've got a hell of a gaming card for very little money. If you don't mind being a bit behind the times.
Read our Gigabyte XFX Radeon HD 4890 review
2. MSI R5770 Hawk - £134
The jury's still out on whether or not it's worth buying a DirectX 11 graphics card, but this MSI effort is pretty spiffing, especially given the low price point. Although it's only got a 128-bit memory bus, the faster GDDR5 memory means it's able to deliver incredible results in all but the uber-demanding Crysis: Warhead. The price isn't too bad, either, and MSI has pre-overclocked the card for maximum performance. We just can't help but wonder what it would be like with a 256-bit bus, though.
Read our Gigabyte MSI R5770 Hawk review
3. BFG GeForce GTX 260 OC - £151
Sitting squarely between AMD's 4870 and 4890, Nvidia's card can give them both a run for their money. It may be getting on a bit, but it's still a cracking card, and it gave good results in our tests. In performance and price, it may err a bit too closely to AMD's 4870, but that's a good thing - the only thing you've got to choose is which manufacturer you want to give your love to.
Read our BFG GeForce GTX 260 OC review
4. Zotac GeForce GTX 275 AMP! - £172
Simply the best graphics card available at the time our review was written last year, it's still a wonderful bit of kit. It packs a 448-bit memory bus to let all that graphical goodness flow nicely, and what's more is that this pre-overclocked version bumps up the already-decent shader, GPU and memory clocks. The result is a card that performs just as well as Nvidia's pricier GTX 285, plus you get all Nvidia's CUDA and PhysX goodness.
Read our Zotac GeForce GTX 275 AMP! review
5. Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4890 Toxic - £174
The Toxic's main selling point isn't that it's poisonous, but that it includes Sapphire's proprietary Vapor-X technology. This relies on thermodynamics to cool the GPU, and it works very, very well. If you're a novice in the world of graphics card overclocking, this is the card for you: the Vapor-X is much more forgiving than stock coolers. Add to this excellent gaming performance out of the box, and the Toxic is a great card made even better.
![[EMBARGOED!!!!!!!!! JAN 8 1130AM EST] An array of Nvidia RTX 4080 Super GPUs on a black reflective surface](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/F97ztia94GwCbhp9aZniJe-1280-80.jpg.webp)
