Price Guides, April 2005: Video Cards

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:

The 128MB Radeon X700 cards are priced very reasonably, but the $10 difference between it and a moderately priced GeForce 6600GT is all the evidence that we need.


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.

XFX's GeForce 6600GT PCIe [RTPE: PVT43GND] has behaved similarly as well, with decent price cuts in the last couple of days, bringing the price of that video card down to $170 even.


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!

Usually we wouldn't even bring up the Radeon 9800 Pros in favor of the AGP GeForce 6600GTs, but these are still killer cards, particularly for $140! In any case, if you strictly stick to DirectX games and don't want to part with AGP, $140 for a Radeon 9800 Pro is certainly not a purchase that you will regret.