Price Guides July 2004: Video Cards and Memory
by Vinney Shimpi on July 30, 2004 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Introduction
Welcome back to this week's Price Guide, covering video cards and DDR memory. Ever since NVIDIA released their NV40 platform and ATI released their R420, we've all been waiting patiently for prices on the last generation of cards to drop, thus far, to no avail. Unfortunately, it seems that we still have a bit more waiting to do until older cards drop in price, or for NV40 and R420 to become available in any real quantities. In the meantime, both companies battle it out on the benchmarking battlefield and vie for your hard earned dollars.Similarly, DDR memory prices seem to be unrelenting these days. The last few weeks showed a rather small break in the rising prices and, in some cases, even showed some small drops. Sadly, those prices are back on the rise again for no apparent or good reason.
As always, be sure to visit our RealTime Pricing Engine to view these price changes, for better or worse, and see the movers and shakers for yourself.
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Trake - Sunday, August 1, 2004 - link
bah, you are indeed correct. too bad you didn't post a couple days ago. :-) it would have saved me a whole lot of time. The AOpen 5700 just, not "LE", is indeed a good buy. I discovered that my friend's was in fact an AOpen 5700 whereas the one i purchased, by mistake no less, was 5700LE. My apologies to the good people at anandtech.PrinceGaz - Sunday, August 1, 2004 - link
256MB versions of mid-range (and low-end) cards often use slower memory than the 128MB versions, which makes them slower cards overall. If you use something like Coolbits (just Google for it if unsure) you can check the current core and memory clock of your card to see how it compares with other 5700's.The usual speed of a 5700 is core 425, memory 550. There are also the faster 5700 Ultra (core 475, memory 900), and the really slow 5700LE (core 250, memory 400).
That should be enough for you to find out how your 5700 compares with the standard.
Trake - Saturday, July 31, 2004 - link
Please don't ever recommend the AOpen 5700 again. Using a benchmark I heard of here at anandtech (aguamark 3) I found that it is a terribly underperforming card (i have 3dmark2003 but didn't bother because the AQ3 rating was so poor). I used a friends 5700 a couple weeks ago to see what kind of gains i'd get by upgrading, they were substantial, though i didn't know the brand. I have a pixelview 5600. The AOpen 5700 didn't even outperform my 5600, not to mention come even close to the performance of my friends 5700. The AOpen 5700 performed about 8% worse than my pixelview 5600 and a whopping 33% worse than my friends 5700. 33%!!!! and it's SUPPOSED to use the same nvidia chipset? I bought it because of the recommendations here and man am i now sorry. In all fairness to anandtech, i did buy the 256 version and not the 128... not sure what kind of difference that would make. It's not a driver issue either because i made sure all tests used the same and most recent drivers. AOpen = suck