Price Guides, February 2005: Video Cards

Mid-Range

Now that the X700XT is officially dead, the X700 Pro lineup is the only sub-$200 PCIe competitor that ATI can call "mid-range".  The vanilla X800 PCIe cards are nowhere near the originally quoted $199 price range; some cards are priced as high as $355 (which puts them only a few dollars less than their XL counterparts) [RTPE: Radeon X800 -XL -XT -Pro - SE].  However, to be fair, we do need to emphasize that the retail launch for these products only occurred a few days ago.

On the AGP side of things, NVIDIA has another easy victory in the sub-$200 market.  Given that the Radeon 9800 Pro has actually increased in price over the last year, the GeForce 6600GT doesn't have to work too hard to corner the $199 price point.  For example, the Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro [RTPE: 100556] (which couldn't keep up to the GeForce 6600GT in November's benchmarks) continued to spike in price as availability dried up from two of its larger US distributors.  

The story looks even bleaker for the 256MB Radeons, although the 128MB 6600GTs are clearly targeted to compete with the 128MB Radeon 9800s. XFX dominates the 6600GT AGP landscape, and without a doubt, the card [RTPE: PVT43AND] remains our AGP mid-range pick.  It's too bad that there still is a $20 premium on AGP 6600GT's over their PCIe brethren, but unfortunately, we have to play the hand that we are dealt.



When we change gears and look at the PCIe mid-range, the choices aren't as clear cut.  Our retail Radeon X700 Pro exploration from a few months ago clearly demonstrated vast performance differences between the major manufacturers.  Sapphire consistently came out near the top in each of our benchmarks, occasionally even ahead of the GeForce 6600GT in DirectX benchmarks. If you don't plan on playing too many OpenGL games, the Sapphire X700 Pro [RTPE: 100595] clearly offers one of the most well-rounded cards that you can buy, particularly for the price.  This is only the 128MB version - which puts it very close to the Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB in terms of performance.    


If the Radeon X800 replaces the X700 Pro in the $199 price point, we would almost certainly expect the (relatively) new X700 Pro to drop in price rather than EOL; our roadmaps do not reveal any reason to stop the X700 Pro from sticking around. Fortunately, Pigeon Hole Principle applies to PC hardware economics too.