Price Guides, February 2005: Video Cards
by Kristopher Kubicki on February 19, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
The Low End
Anand's benchmarks in December told us all that we needed to hear. NVIDIA clearly dominates the low end PCIe market with their TurboCache solutions, and even if they didn't, the non-TurboCache cards still manage to out-muscle ATI's X300 lineup. ATI's HyperMemory will be upon us soon (again), so in the meantime, we just have to wait and see. At the very least, we are excited that the PCIe low end video cards are actually sub-$100 video cards. Considering that the 6200 TC GPUs have only been available in mass quantities for a few weeks, we should start seeing $50 offerings in a few months for those really on a budget.AOpen leads the pack with their 64-bit and 32-bit options. Don't expect to get a particularly immersive experience in World of Warcraft - particularly considering that the cards are paging from your system memory; but for everyday computing and office productivity, TurboCache is your best bet. Our industry sources have hinted that mainstream NVIDIA IGP might be replaced by $50 TurboCache options in the near future, and given the raw power of the 6200 TC versus GMA900, TurboCache is probably the more economical purchase anyway. Anand's benchmarks show that the TurboCache lineup scales very linearly, but the sweet spot for price and performance on the low end is right at the 64-bit range.
If ATI's HyperMemory proves just as useful at TurboCache on the low end, we could be in for a real interesting battle. ATI has a long roadmap of IGP chipsets ahead of them, so we know that they do not expect sub-$100 video cards to replace their IGP market. However, with ATI just beginning to get a taste of NVIDIA's aggressiveness on the AMD platform (RS480), best laid plans could quickly change.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
33 Comments
View All Comments
Pete84 - Saturday, February 19, 2005 - link
Considering the much higher transistor count and die size of the X800XL, I doubt that ATI will be able to get to the 6600GT price point.BUT they will or should be able to compete on the price / performance ratio.
Sc4freak - Saturday, February 19, 2005 - link
"Prices are falling rapidly on the X800XL, and we will probably have a better feel for the market in the next couple of weeks. If the card stabilizes just under the GeForce 6600GT, we would be crushed, but at the rate that prices are dropping, it might do much better than that."Why? I'd say that if the X800XL stabilised at ~$200, I'd be very, very happy.
Ozenmacher - Saturday, February 19, 2005 - link
I just bought an ATI X800 XL...I will take that card anyday over the 6800 GT