Price Guides, February 2005: Video Cards
by Kristopher Kubicki on February 19, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Mid-Range
Now that the X700XT is officially dead, the X700 Pro lineup is the only sub-$200 PCIe competitor that ATI can call "mid-range". The vanilla X800 PCIe cards are nowhere near the originally quoted $199 price range; some cards are priced as high as $355 (which puts them only a few dollars less than their XL counterparts) [RTPE: Radeon X800 -XL -XT -Pro - SE]. However, to be fair, we do need to emphasize that the retail launch for these products only occurred a few days ago.On the AGP side of things, NVIDIA has another easy victory in the sub-$200 market. Given that the Radeon 9800 Pro has actually increased in price over the last year, the GeForce 6600GT doesn't have to work too hard to corner the $199 price point. For example, the Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro [RTPE: 100556] (which couldn't keep up to the GeForce 6600GT in November's benchmarks) continued to spike in price as availability dried up from two of its larger US distributors.
When we change gears and look at the PCIe mid-range, the choices aren't as clear cut. Our retail Radeon X700 Pro exploration from a few months ago clearly demonstrated vast performance differences between the major manufacturers. Sapphire consistently came out near the top in each of our benchmarks, occasionally even ahead of the GeForce 6600GT in DirectX benchmarks. If you don't plan on playing too many OpenGL games, the Sapphire X700 Pro [RTPE: 100595] clearly offers one of the most well-rounded cards that you can buy, particularly for the price. This is only the 128MB version - which puts it very close to the Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB in terms of performance.
If the Radeon X800 replaces the X700 Pro in the $199 price point, we would almost certainly expect the (relatively) new X700 Pro to drop in price rather than EOL; our roadmaps do not reveal any reason to stop the X700 Pro from sticking around. Fortunately, Pigeon Hole Principle applies to PC hardware economics too.
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PrinceGaz - Saturday, February 26, 2005 - link
It's been a week now, is Wes going to let us know what issues he found with the nForce4 boards?rastamanphan - Wednesday, February 23, 2005 - link
Where are the AGP ATI cards on the highend card pricelist?Bobby Peru - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
crucibelle, the x700 pro is not PCI-E it is AGP bus.they are saying, for PCI-E use x700 pro or Leadtek
6600GT PCI-E. For AGP use XFX 6600GT. Only newer
motherboards have PCI-E.
I guess if nobody else is having heat problems that
guy at pricegrabber installed his heatsink wrong.
donxvi - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
XFX claims the new heatsink is 20 degrees COOLER than the old, reference design.fargazer - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
I have been considering a Linux desktop for a while now, and one thing I could use from a video card roundup is how well the various cards perform under Linux. Any chance of that being covered, either in a general pricing guide for video cards, or in a separate article?crucibelle - Monday, February 21, 2005 - link
Kristopher,I was wondering if you could tell me why the 6600GT was previously recommended as the best mid-range PCI-E card (midrange buyer's guide), but now it's the x700 pro that is recommended. Why did you all change your minds? Thanks!
Bobby Peru - Sunday, February 20, 2005 - link
This raises the general issue of possible differences between "review" pre-production boards and actual production boards. It may be asking a lot but it would be interesting if review sites were able to just buy boards at retail rather than having special boards sent to them by the manufacturer. I need to find some explanation of reading the writing on the memory chips to determine their speed. I will say that at least review sites do generally post detailed photos of the boards. I can believe that if a manufacturer wanted to shave costs before doing a production run that the memory and the heatsink would be obvious places to start. At this point I would simply ask people what their heat sinks look like, what their memory chips say, and if their board looks like the review board photos. For all we know the other review is from some agent provacateur troll. The last sentence is a typo, 1.6ns is preferable to 2.0.KristopherKubicki - Sunday, February 20, 2005 - link
Bobby Peru: I have one of these cards and I have not noticed the thermal throttling mentioned in the price grabber "review". I cannot disrepute the 2.0ns memory, but as for gettings speeds lower than a 5950: that seems like a complete farce.Kristopher
Bobby Peru - Sunday, February 20, 2005 - link
I wonder if AnandTech or someone who bought this card recently could comment on this review from pricegrabber..."I purchased this card after reading many many reviews of the GF 6600GT series of cards, especially the XFX version of this card. Needless to say I am quite disappointed with what I received.
XFX has changed their production process for their 6600GT series of cards. No longer will you get 1.6ns memory, they are now including 2.0ns. Which by itself it not necessarily bad, but every review currently out there was done with the 1.6ns memory. You will not be able to get the same results that the reviewers have gotten in the past.
The worst part of the changes XFX made with this card was the heat sink and cooler. The cooler they are now shipping on the card is a small underpowered piece of crap, not the nVidia standard 6600GT cooler.
I removed the cooler, cleaner all surfaces with 100% Isopropyl Alcohol then re-installed it with Artic Silver 5. The result: the GPU runs at 55c even at IDLE with no overclocking. Under full load it hits 80c+. This cooler sucks.
I can’t play Half-Life without choppiness as the card is throttling down because of excess heat. In 3DMark 2003, this card gets a lower score than my FX5950. Again because of heat related throttling.
If you buy this card plan on buying a third party cooler as well. Or make sure you get an older version of the card that has the standard nVidia heat sink and fan. That way you can get the 2.0ns memory as well.
glennpratt - Sunday, February 20, 2005 - link
AGP != PCI-E