High End Buyer's Guide - September 2004
by Wesley Fink on August 30, 2004 12:22 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
PCI Express Video
PCIe Recommendation: ATI X800 XT Platinum 256MBPrice: $545 Shipped
If you are an overclocker looking for top performance on a new Intel 925X board, the X800 XT is the best PCI Express option, particularly if you plan to overclock the system. In all of our reviews of the Intel 925X boards, overclocking requires running the PCIe out of spec, and our tests of the current ATI video cards show that they tolerate out-of-spec PCIe speeds much better than comparable nVidia video cards. This makes the X800 XT Platinum a very good match to our 925X alternative High-End system.
The X800 XT is still hard to find, but it appears that availability is improving and will continue to become less of a problem over time. As we have pointed out in the past, you can choose either the X800 XT or the 6800 Ultra and be perfectly happy and perfectly competitive in the performance area. Therefore, if you don't plan to overclock, then either top-end card will fit your needs very well. However, for overclocking PCI Express, the ATI cards simply survive to higher PCIe overclock levels. If Doom 3 is your game, that might also sway you the other way to the 6800 Ultra, which does perform better in Doom 3 than ATI's top card.
Listed below is part of our RealTime pricing engine, which lists the lowest prices available on ATI video cards from many different reputable vendors:
If you cannot find the lowest prices on the products that we've recommended on this page, it's because we don't list some of them in our RealTime pricing engine. Until we do, we suggest that you do an independent search online at the various vendors' web sites. Just pick and choose where you want to buy your products by looking for a vendor located under the "Vendor" heading.
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mcveigh - Monday, August 30, 2004 - link
what about for a storage drive the new maxtors with 16mb cache and TCQ features?didn't Anand hint a little while ago there would be a review of them ?
of course now he has a wife to keep happy....there goes the place! ;)
Booty - Monday, August 30, 2004 - link
Just agreeing about the price engine thing - scrolling that far is pretty annoying. If they have to have it that way to earn money and keep the site free, so be it... but if not, I know I'd definitely appreciate it being moved.PrinceGaz - Monday, August 30, 2004 - link
Good article, I couldn't really fault any of the suggestions this time :) The only things that might be worth considering as this is a high end system is spending an extra $200-300 and throwing in 2GB of memory, either as 2x1GB sticks if they are just as fast, else as 4x512MB. As I do a bit video capturing and editing, and like many broadband users fill a lot of space quickly (don't ask), I'd definitely go for the Maxtor 300MB drive with 16MB cache for $260. Both of those are only minor points though and overall I agree with the suggestions.One thing I've been thinking about for a few days now are dual Opteron systems. A couple of Opteron 250's on a suitable dual S940 mobo would only cost about $1000 more than the FX53 system and mobo. Alternatively a couple of 248's will lower the differential to around $600.
The important thing is that multi-threaded apps are becoming increasingly common because of HT, and next year when dual core CPUs start appearing it'll be normal for any CPU heavy application to be multi-threaded so as to take full advantage of them. I know you could always replace the FX53 with a dual-core Toledo next year, but why wait for the extra performance when you can get it today with a couple of 250's (and the 250's could be replaced with dual-core Italy's next year giving even more power if desired).
The extra thousand dollars is a roughly 30% total price increase and is not insignificant, but you'll get considerably more than 30% performance improvement with any multi-threaded CPU heavy application, so its money well spent. In fact its hard not to recommend it as the high end choice as its still comes in under the $5000 limit.
iversonyin - Monday, August 30, 2004 - link
i would rather have dual dell 2001 then 23" apple23" apple is nice but also come with a steep price.
dont we all love dual-monitor here?
but if anyone can spend $3600 on a computer, what extras $2000 to them
Wesley Fink - Monday, August 30, 2004 - link
#3 - Typo corrected.I agree the Apple is a nice display, but Apple uses a proprietary Digital interface called ADC instead of the standard DVI Connector. Some enterprising manufacturers have developed some conversion connectors but the converter doesn't work with most nVidia video cards. In the end this is not a solution we could recommend right now.
There is also the cost difference, since the 20.1" Dell is about $800 and the 23" Apple is about $2000. A 260% price increase to go from a great 20.1" display to an Apple 23" display and converter seemed a bit much. There is also a 30" Apple Cinema display BTW.
Fr0zeN2 - Monday, August 30, 2004 - link
Great guide, but...Yeah, the pricing engine's been bugging me for a while now too. Honestly, there are sites like pricewatch.com that you can go to to view prices on these, as well as many other similar products. Especially when your listings include products that have absolutely no relevance to the one mentioned (helooo gf5950 prices?).
kherman - Monday, August 30, 2004 - link
#5This is a free site. If you like it that way, I'd get used to those advertisements.
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Aside from that, 74 gig? If I made a "dream rig" yuo'd be seeing 400 GB+ in RAID 5 (3x200)
kherman - Monday, August 30, 2004 - link
Of course, for this rig, get the BFG 6800 UltraJonathanYoung - Monday, August 30, 2004 - link
I just want to add a comment I've been wanting to make for awhile now... would you please add a link to the next page *above* the realtime pricing engine so that people who do not wish to view the pricing engine don't have to scroll alllllllll the way down just to get to the next page? This was especially bad on the "AGP Video" section of this guide. Thank you!shuttleboi - Monday, August 30, 2004 - link
Why hasn't Anandtech reviewed any 6800GT videocards???