Buyer's Guide: High End System - July 2004

Video

Recommendation: Gigabyte GV-N68U256D 256MB GeForce 6800 Ultra
Price: $539 shipped

While the dust is still settling in this round of the video wars, we do know that the new generation of video cards from nVidia and ATI are twice as fast as the previous generation in many benchmarks. We also found in our testing of the new nVidia nForce3-250 chipset that it performs a bit better with an nVidia graphics card. With that in mind, we included a GeForce 6800 Ultra in our High End system to match the nForce3-250 Ultra-based MSI K8N Neo2.

While they are still all but impossible to find, you simply can't ignore the new cards when building a high end system. We ended up relaxing our rules by including the Gigabyte 6800 Ultra because several vendors are showing availability in the first 2 weeks of July. Several vendors are also showing prices closer to the $500 that we expect when cards are more readily available.

The 6800 Ultra features 16 pipelines, a GPU at 400MHz, and 256MB of DDR3 memory at 1.1GHz. It is a nice step up from the 12-pipe 6800 and the lower clocked 6800 GT, yet both of these 2 cards are still blazing performers, and are easier to find. There is also an even faster version of the 6800 family, called the 6800 Ultra Extreme, but as rare as 6800 Ultra cards are right now, we would hesitate to recommend an even rarer card, which is a higher-clocked 6800 Ultra. The best way to see what the 6800 Ultra can do is to read the latest AnandTech Video Card review, which compares ATI X800 and nVidia 6800 in both AGP and PCI Express flavors.


Alternative: Gigabyte GV-R80X256V 256MB X800 XT
Price: $545 shipped

If your prefer ATI video cards, there is only good to be said for the performance of the X800 XT. Once again, several vendors are promising Gigabyte products around July 7^th for the X800 XT video cards, so that is our recommendation. On the basis of features and the future, the X800 XT should be considered the culmination of the series that began with the 9700 PRO; the 6800 Ultra should be considered the beginning of a new graphics chip series. Having said that, the chips perform almost exactly the same in our benchmarks, and the ATI is actually faster in a few benchmarks. This even performance between ATI and nVidia also extends to the PCI Express interface where the cards take different approaches to their interface to the PCI Express bus.

Our point is that you can choose either the X800 XT or the 6800 Ultra and be perfectly happy and perfectly competitive, although there are certainly differences beneath the hood that might sway you in one direction or the other. The ATI X800 XT would be an excellent match to either the Athlon 64 system or the Intel Pentium 4 system, and would perform very well on either platform.

If price for video is a concern, you can pare down quite a bit and still select a new generation video card. The basic 12-pipeline nVidia 6800 is available for about $300, while the 16-pipe 6800 GT and 12-pipe X800 PRO will cost about $400. The performance is pretty consistent with the price, although we do find the 6800 at $300 a very good value, particularly if you find one that overclocks well.

With the introduction of the new generation of video cards, there are also some real bargains available at what was the old high end. You can find either an nVidia GeForce 5900XT 128MB or an ATI 9800 PRO 128MB for around $200, but the 9800 PRO is generally regarded as the better performer in a comparison of these two cards. The 9800 XT and the comparable 5950 Ultra are still selling in the $370 range, which is a poor value compared to the nVidia 6800 at $300 or the 6800 GT or X800 PRO at $400.

We recommend that you stay away from the 9800SE video cards. With the 9800 PRO so reasonable these days, there is absolutely no reason to settle for a 9800SE that, at best, performs on par with or often even slower than a 9600 Pro in 3D games. Don't be fooled - a 9800SE performs nothing like a full-blown 8-pipe, 256 bit memory interface 9800 Pro.

Listed below is part of our RealTime pricing engine, which lists the lowest prices available on ATI video cards from many different reputable vendors:




If you cannot find the lowest prices on the products that we've recommended on this page, it's because we don't list some of them in our RealTime pricing engine. Until we do, we suggest that you do an independent search online at the various vendors' web sites. Just pick and choose where you want to buy your products by looking for a vendor located under the "Vendor" heading.