Price Guides July 2004: Video Cards and Memory
by Vinney Shimpi on July 30, 2004 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
DDR Memory
As mentioned in this guide's introduction, prices seem to be back to their uphill slope lately for DDR memory. Whether factories are cutting back on production, or manufacturers are planning to try making the push for DDR2 is difficult to discern. In either case, the price increases that we are seeing are enough to be noticed; in some cases, going up by as much as $40 for a 512MB stick.Since our systems still need memory, regardless of price, we've sorted through some of the currently available modules to find the best prices available. One of the better values that stuck out was a 512MB stick of PC3200 from Corsair. Being their XMS line of memory, overclocking will prove to be stable and, even at default timings, sufficient for even the most demanding user. While higher-end options such as PC3700 and PC4000 seem to be widely available, the performance increase is too minimal to warrant the higher cost unless overclocking is of paramount importance. For virtually every end user, and even the vast majority of gamers, the above recommendation should prove to be more than enough to keep your system's memory department happy.
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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