Price Guides, April 2005: Video Cards

What a week it has been for the price guides! Did you get a chance to see the redesigned beta webpage? NewEgg wasn’t the only one to scrap their original beta web design at the last second, apparently! Our working beta was nearing completion until we learned that the price engine code was just a few pixels shy of fitting in the AnandTech standard borders. We played around with some ideas and twisted some graphics around and finally settled on a layout similar to the one that you can see here. After we wade through some of the more cosmetic changes and updates, our guide engine will be finally ready to sit on the main site (we promise this time!).

Speaking of redesigns, NewEgg’s redesign launched just a few days ago. The new design is a little easier on wide screen displays and focuses more on user reviews. In any case, we like the new design, although it is definitely a large change from the old design and an adjustment if you were accustomed to it.

In video card news, X800 XL and X800 video cards are now in the mainstream AGP market and like so many things AGP, our disappointment can hardly be contained. After months of waiting, it looks like our friends at Sapphire were the only ones capable of bringing the AGP X800 XL cards into any sort of competitive pricing with their PCIe counterparts, but with inexpensive nForce4 motherboards and current Intel PCIe motherboards hitting their second iteration, it feels really difficult to give AGP much worth while praise.

We have received word from several motherboard manufacturers that GeForce 6200 Turbo Cache cards are going to start shipping with low end PCIe motherboards. Supposedly, this should help keep production costs down on low end boards as IGP motherboards will not need separate designs for end users. On the other hand, the end user might pay more for the additional packaging/production of the GPU on an external card. We will be following this very closely over the next few quarters.