Price Guides, April 2005: Video Cards
by Kristopher Kubicki on April 23, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
GPU Ultra High End
For whatever reason, we always seem to catch some flak from our readers if we don't mention the ultra unaffordable high end stuff. We would never buy this stuff in a million years, and it would be very silly for us to recommend any of it (these are price guides, aren't they?). However, we do concede that the trends on pricing that these products exhibit are important, since a dip in the ultra enthusiast line will usually correlate with a dip in the high end line.X850 cards still have not taken off, and for whatever reason, our manufacturers decided that it was better to increase the price on many of the cards over the last few weeks. Whatever the logic, the consumer certainly doesn't win here.
The ultra high end cards have completely stabilized. Like the ATI ultra high end, the better priced GeForce 6800 Ultras increased in price since our last guide. The lowest priced ultra high end, the eVGA GeForce 6800 Ultra 256MB [RTPE: 256-A8-N345-AX], stopped all movement around the first of this month and shows no sign of letting up. The graph below illustrates this card's price trends over the last six months.
eVGA GeForce 6800 Ultra 256MB
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semo - Monday, April 25, 2005 - link
it certainly does Kristopherthanks
the issue with x300se running doom3:
had no time to check the settings and i just played the firts 10mins of the game (just shot one worker) and it wasn't choppy. that impressed me because on my 7500 even the main menu was choppy (not talking about walking and jumping just changing control settings). while playing i saw some smoke and it did not look good so there was no eye candy but at least it run ok.
anyway, my friend is now playing painkiller (ragdolls and particles flying all over the screen) and he says there's no slowdown. my 7500 gave up on the 3rd level :( . (see why i'm looking for a radeon 9800)
dripgoss - Monday, April 25, 2005 - link
LOL on the Newegg reviews.. yeah I posted up a very thorough and honest 2/5 "egg testimonial" on an MSI 6600GT and they wouldn't post it. I bumped it up to 5/5 and it went through but when it finally goy posted to the site it came out as "Nice card" verbatim!! And then they turn around and post testimonials from people who either don't own the product or bought it elsewhere! If they hae to approve the reviews before posting, that's funny..spittledip - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link
My apologies! I am used to scoping out all the prices almost daily through pricewatch, and they always have 9800 SEs listed as pros. That is one sweet sweet deal!LoneWolf15 - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link
I think there's an important thing to mention regarding the ASUS X800XL video card. The price is far higher than competitors, and yet some models of their X800XL cards use DDR RAM instead of GDDR3 like the others, and the RAM is clocked far lower. This makes it really hard to tell if you're getting a good card for your money. Should you get the lower clocked DDR-based card, you'll be paying a lot more for less performance. I'd recommend Built By ATI, Powercolor, or other brands of cards for this reason.ASUS card specs (for comparison)
http://usa.asus.com/prog/spec.asp?m=Extreme%20AX80...
Powercolor card specs:
http://www.tul.com.tw/global/productlist.aspx?fold...
KristopherKubicki - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link
semo: The first 2 and the last one are definitely 256-bit, Radeon 9800 Pros. The 3rd one did not mention whether or not it was 128-bit or 256-bit, but I am pretty sure that particular SKU is 256-bit.Hope that helps,
Kristopher
KristopherKubicki - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link
Vol2005: It's a borderline situation with that rig. I would say you would be OK, but anything less and you would be better off getting a PCIe motherboard and video card.Kristopher
toyota - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link
#20 what are you talking about an x300se gets 10 fps in doom3 at 1024x768. even in 800x600 its only 14 fps. you must be playing the game while you are stoned if you call that smooth gameplay.Vol2005 - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link
Vol2005 - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link
Anybody could tell me, please...if I will upgrade my graphics to AGP X800XL,
would the power of my AXP2500@3200 be enough for it or am i gonna upgrade cpu/mb too
Vol2005 - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link