Weekly Hardware Price Guides: May 2003 Edition

Over the last year, video cards have been hard to follow.From time to time, we will go months without seeing any changes. Then, once in a while, we have a month like May 2003 where entire video card lines are phased out in a matter of weeks.

Perhaps the largest disappointment in the video industry was the GeForceFX 5800 (Ultra).As much as we praised the nForce2 for being an excellent forward design in motherboard chipsets, we have to equally criticize the 5800 for being a horrible video card from a design and implementation viewpoint.

It’s not so much that the FX 5800 was an altogether bad video card, but rather it was just a case of Murphy’s Law. Manufacturing problems combined with extremely late release schedules turned the GeForceFX 5800 line into a Voodoo5 repeat. The unusually loud fan put the final nail on the coffin.However, NVIDIA is not new to the video card market, and they recently took a few steps that have been quite commendable.For those of you not following the market, check out our GeForceFX 5900 preview we did a few weeks ago. NVIDIA did the right thing admitting the 5800 line did not live up to they hype and NVIDIA’s standards.To make a long story short, it looks like the entire line will be discontinued within the next few weeks.This will be slowly replaced by the 5900 series.

This is not to say the 5900 cards are perfect, either. Although the 5900 (NV35) chipset is not completely finalize, a slew of reviews have accused the video card giant of purposely inflating benchmarks by hard coding some acceleration into the chipset that inaccurately takes advantage of weaknesses in benchmark suites. While the evidence looks compelling, we cannot speculate this early on what is going on. We will most likely see a different “final” product and driver set that does not contain the same problems.

On the ATI side of the field, the Radeon 9800 cards also made a stellar preview.Some distributors are beginning to carry 9800 cards, so it month be long until they start showing up everywhere.As a lot of people have already pointed out, this card does not really warrant an upgrade from the already dynamite 9700 (Pro) and 9500 Pro Radeons. The older 9xxx Radeons already support DirectX 9, so Half Life 2 and Doom III are going to look spectacular anyway (and you will save yourself a few hundred bucks too).