Price Guides, April 2005: Video Cards

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

We would like to think that these ultra high end cards will become the next generation value and mid-range cards, but this will not be the case (does anyone remember the GeForce 5950 Ultra?). Partner manufacturers for both ATI and NVIDIA hint that these tall orders are not the workhorses of either camp. Like the Pentium 4 Extreme Editions and the Athlon FX processors, these cards continue to grab a lot more PR than sales.