Price Guides, April 2005: Video Cards

The Low End

We are still waiting for ATI’s HyperMemory video cards, unfortunately. While we do have samples in the lab, it seems that a ship date for these cards is still several weeks (months?) away – longer than what we expected. We are also very confused by the message sent by NVIDIA regarding their TurboCache video cards. We saw very good availability on TurboCache video cards in March, but now it seems that those same video cards are much drier. We still recommend the $60 TurboCache cards over the ATI offerings right now, but that could all change if HyperMemory turns out to hold its own.


You’ll notice that we don’t have many recommendations for low end AGP video cards. To be honest, there really aren’t any. At this point, a low end AMD VIA motherboard with rudimentary integrated graphics are probably best if you decide to go the Sempron route. As most AGP video cards have increased in price over the last few weeks, it would be cheaper to get a low end nForce4 Socket 754 [RTPE: nForce4 754] motherboard and a TurboCache video card instead of an nForce3 motherboard and a Radeon 9550.


Let’s hope by this time next month, we will have more options to go with on the low end spectrum (particularly from ATI)!