Price Guides, April 2005: Video Cards
by Kristopher Kubicki on April 23, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
GPU Mid-range
Moving into the mid-range sector puts the ball back in NVIDIA's court, particularly for a certain ever addicting online MMORPG. While you lose the next 8 weeks of your life killing dragons until you hit level 60, you might as well do it in style. Sapphire Radeon X700 Pro [RTPE: 100596] prices have fallen slightly since last month, but nothing to really get excited about. Below is a graph of X700 Pro prices over the last three months:
We were very excited this week to see the price difference between AGP and PCIe 6600GT video cards disappear. While we shun AGP video cards on the high end, mid-range AGP video cards are extremely reasonable right now. Below, you can see the behavior of the XFX GeForce 6600GT AGP [RTPE: PVT43AND] over the last few weeks.
Aside from the fact that GeForce 6600GTs are priced the same as X700 Pros, ATI has a lot of work to do to catch up in the $150 to $200 market. ATI regains a little bit of ground at the $100 mark, pairing the Radeon X600 Pro against the GeForce 6600 vanilla edition. For a $100 video card, Gigabyte has a very solid offering, although the other video cards for the same price point don't advertise nearly the same prices.
Before we completely jump off the mid-range and into low end cards, we wanted to point out a deal that we spotted on Radeon 9800 Pro AGP video cards. Check out the week's prices on the Sapphire 9800 Pro [RTPE: 100556] cards!
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JarredWalton - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link
20 - Doom 3 running smooth on a X300SE!? I'd like to see that, as I've tried Doom 3 on an ATI Xpress 200 chipset (roughly the equivalent of the X300SE) and it ran like a slug. Even at low details and 640x480 resolution Doom 3 couldn't pull more than 15 FPS on that setup.400 MHz RAM with a 64-bit bus only gives 3.2 GBps of bandwidth, which is simply not enough for Doom 3's shadowing engine. Maybe if you disable the shadows and specular highlights it would get 30+ FPS, but then what's the point?
semo - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link
does somebody know if these are real radeon 9800pro cardshttp://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html...
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html...
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html...
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html...
(sorry to firefox users if the links are too long)
#13, i don't know what you mean by benefit. i have a friend who has a dell system (quit booing/laughing, there was a good reason) with x300se and p4 530 (3.0ghz) and doom3 and painkiller run very smoothly on it.
if you want eye candy upgrade your vid card
Zebo - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link
DrMrLordX read between the lines what I quoted above: especially the part about "in a million years."AT don't recommend garbage or stuff that fails some basic price/performance standard. They keep it lean and mean.:)
KristopherKubicki - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link
spittledip: The cards we list as 9800 Pros are in fact 9800 Pros; these are the 256-bit cards. The 128-bit Radeon 9800 SE cards that you are refering to retail for about $110.Kristopher
zemane - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link
Nice timing, I'm just buying a new video card!On page 5 "Low-End cards", second table, first row, the Newegg link for the Sapphire Radeon X300SE 128MB AGP opens the PCIe version page. And the corresponding "Check Prices" link is broken.
And the link that opens the comments popup says there is one more comment than reality.
DrMrLordX - Saturday, April 23, 2005 - link
Woops! Looks like you failed to mention the AGP 6200 cards as well.DrMrLordX - Saturday, April 23, 2005 - link
Interestingly, the 6800NU doesn't seem to be featured anywhere on your price list. Or, at least, I didn't see it.spittledip - Saturday, April 23, 2005 - link
I think someone needs to tell anandtech that those 9800 "pros" for 140$ are really SE models... and 9800 SE are really poor cards-- 9500 pro and 9600 pro beat those out!l3ored - Saturday, April 23, 2005 - link
nevermind... didnt read the second page yet. i have an athlon 64 3000 (754) and a 9800 pro. i think i'd benefit more from upgrading the graphics card first, am i right?l3ored - Saturday, April 23, 2005 - link
am i reading this right? "like so many things AGP, our disappointment can hardly be contained." you guys dont approve of agp anymore? i was under the impression that today's video cards dont require the bandwidth that pci-e gives and so the same card on either platform performs the same. or has that all changed?