Price Guides, February 2005: Video Cards
by Kristopher Kubicki on February 19, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Introduction
Welcome back to another edition of the Price Guides. This week, we have in-depth coverage of current generation video cards from ATI and NVIDIA. As another reminder, the RealTime Price Guides is leaving the beta testing phase, and moving into production real soon! We just implemented a little stronger Boolean logic in the search, so as of today, you can actually search with "NOT" clauses by prefixing a "-" to your search string. For example, to search for all AMD products excluding Semprons, the search string would be "amd - Sempron". Please send us your comments and suggestions on how we can improve our engine. Of course, you can always view the existing release of the engine here. Furthermore, you can view the still beta QuickSearch RSS feed forum thread here.Although we were promised competitive high end video cards from ATI almost three months ago, it looks like you can finally whet your appetite for the excessive (if your computer supports PCIe, that is). Unfortunately, even though we have availability on ATI video cards, price predictions are off almost by $100 and the new Radeons that were supposed to replace the X800 Pro and X800XT are not even close to competitive in price yet. We will get into more detail concerning that in the ATI High End section.
On the low end of things, NVIDIA's TurboCache cards are in stores now in regular volume, so those of you who are just dying to try cards from last year's TurboCache launch will still have a chance.
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KristopherKubicki - Saturday, February 19, 2005 - link
PrinceGaz: We have a roundup scheduled for the very near future (days at most perhaps). From what I could gather from our internal conferences, nForce4 (Ultra and SLI) had several hiccups - but not showstoppers. With the proximity of the analysis, I'll let Wes go into more detail in his review.Kristopher
bobsmith1492 - Saturday, February 19, 2005 - link
Maybe because the xbox runs at like 640x800 resolution, and this hardware can run it at 4 times that resolution with AA and AF and the xbox is a mass-produced group of identical objects that makes it easy to progam for..... :PShizNet - Saturday, February 19, 2005 - link
how the f**k is it possible?xBox runs M$ OS and PC hardWare (including vidCard) and able to play new games just fine AND for only ~$200
where the same game for PC takes extra year to reWrite (i wonder why) and hardWare demands are about $2000 more - just to be able to play the same game??? can you say - we are giving run arounds here? CPU for $400+, memory for $300+, vidCard for $500+.. and ++
what we'd read if there'd be no need for new vidCards every 6 mo.? silver arctic paste review?
PrinceGaz - Saturday, February 19, 2005 - link
Please Kristopher, say more or tell us when the article that reveals the problems is due to be published. I'm one of those who is waiting for E revision A64 before jumping on the nForce4 bandwagon, and I'm glad I did if there are problems with the chipset.I never intend to use SLI though as I know it is more cost effective overall to sell the first card and buy a second-hand replacement instead of another duplicate card.
Are the problems limited to nVidia's nForce4 SLI implementation (which would be odd as you say Intel's Turnwater is fine, and nVidia created SLI), or something more fundamentally wrong with the PCIe implementation?
We need this information as a lot of AT readers are buying nF4 SLI boards every day and will be seriously upset if you have delayed information about a problem.
KristopherKubicki - Saturday, February 19, 2005 - link
Live pretty much answered everything for me. nForce4 beware for now.Kristopher
joeld - Saturday, February 19, 2005 - link
yeah, where are the high end nvidia cards?Regs - Saturday, February 19, 2005 - link
I would also like to know the issues with SLI on motherboards. Since everybody on the message board has been recommending or has all ready purchased a SLI set up, I think it would be of great importance to explain what you guys have uncovered.And I really like that you guys down with the Real-Time pricing engine. It's one powerful piece of programming ingenuity.
Live - Saturday, February 19, 2005 - link
Very nice guide! Keep up the good work. I did miss the 6800 U in the high end AGP tough. Or is it unavailable? I would hope to see a strong stand against paper launches in the next video preview (Hello agp from ATI?) Nivida and ATI are doing a poor job right now.#5 considering it was hinted that AnandTech were supposed to have published there SLI roundup this week I would guess they have uncovered issues in those creepy underground labs they call home. SLI only works on a few games and if you play an unsupported game you take a performance hit and a huge financial hit considering you played for 2 cards and get less performance then one.
#3 I am pretty sure it is supposed to be the 6800GT.
PrinceGaz - Saturday, February 19, 2005 - link
#3- I think it's supposed to say 6800GT, not 6600GT :)AtaStrumf - Saturday, February 19, 2005 - link
What exactly did you mean by:"With **issues** on nForce4 starting to surface, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense right now to throw all of your eggs into the SLI basket."
I'm not aware of any issues.