Price Guides October 2003: Video Cards
by Kristopher Kubicki and Howard Johnson on October 18, 2003 9:17 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
The good news is if you want a high end card you don’t have to spend $300 to get it. Usually, the Radeon 9700 Pro cards retail for about $250, putting them halfway between ATI’s most aggressive midrange card, and the ultra high end 9800 Pro. Aggressive midrange card, you say? As you might know, ATI unveiled the 9600 XT of course. (There is no particular reason why we keep linking to the Unreal2K3 benchmark, it just happens to have all the cards we keep talking about). ATI is starting to take preorders on the 9600 XT for $199 on their website, but we digress. Edit: Several readers have pointed out to me that the 9600 XT will be shipping with the single player version of Half Life 2. Naturally, if you were going to buy Half Life 2 anyway, you save yourself about $30 bucks or so by going with the XT card.
Derek and Anand trumped ATI’s 9600 XT the midrange champion, but as most of us conscious shoppers know, price can be a larger deciding factor than performance. Gigacube and Sapphire both market 9600 Pro cards for $50 less than the XT. It all depends if your $50 (25% percent of the cost) is worth 4 FPS in UT2K3 (13% percent performance). Nay, $150 is the right price for a midrange video card. However, in 8-10 weeks it sounds very plausible that the 9600 XT could fall to that magic $150 level.
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Anonymous User - Sunday, October 19, 2003 - link
#5 Maybe should read some older video card reviews... for instance the Geforce3 review. You could make the exact same arguement there. Anand stated that people who plan on upgrading should wait till fall for the ATI 8500. When it came out, it didnt perform to well because of poor drivers. Despite this, Anand still recommended that people shouldnt purchase a Geforce3 until new ATI drivers were released.I can guarantee that if a new NVIDIA card came out first and an ATI card was right around the corner, youd see the things like "Dont upgrade yet, with ATI's new card around the corner, theres no telling what they'll have in store for us." etc etc. But of course you wouldn't argue that.
Your comments towards Kris (and Anand, as you did in fact mention his name) are completely illogical and very innapropriate. You dont have to throw out baseless accusations that do nothing more than insult the integrity of staff members just because you disagreed with something stated in the review.
Anonymous User - Sunday, October 19, 2003 - link
booyah! :DAnonymous User - Sunday, October 19, 2003 - link
#5: As a proud owner of a 9800 pro, why would you call me a fanboy? To say that we dont know anything about NVIDIA's NV38 is silly, as I even posted links to the benchmarks.As for forum posts, feel free to link to them.
Both of my hardware recommendations were ATI cards. I think your comments are total unsubstantiated.
Cheers,
Kristopher
Anonymous User - Sunday, October 19, 2003 - link
"This, of course, is assuming it doesn’t get any competition from NVIDIA."Was that sentence really needed? Might as well say XGI too because you dont know jack squat about what the geforce 5700, or whatever driver updates, are going to perform like.
Kristopher is a fanboy. Its been heavily talked about on the forums. For someone reason you go out of your way to credit Nvidia. In all the ATI reviews you and Anand say WAIT TO SEE what Nvidia has to counter 6 weeks! from now.
WTF
I bet if ATi goes to market first with the R400 you will not recommend buying one (assuming it does great) because your waiting for Nvidia. And then CONTINUE not to recommend until Nvidia has released their product an entire year later, due to delays. JESUS
Call me an ATI fanboy, i dont care. I am a sad owner of a geforceFX and wish i went the ATi route instead.
Anonymous User - Sunday, October 19, 2003 - link
I'm using a sapphire radeon 9700 non-pro, is there a similiar pro hack for this? I've tried the omega drivers, but its hack doesnt work and i think they just removed it because of it.Anonymous User - Sunday, October 19, 2003 - link
#1, learn how to read, its on the first page.Anonymous User - Saturday, October 18, 2003 - link
#1 Isn't that mentioned on the first page?Anonymous User - Saturday, October 18, 2003 - link
Why not mention the 9800SE->9800 hack?.. oh, I know why. It succeeds less often than the 9500 one and the price boost isn't worth it.
BUT STILL