Weekly Hardware Price Guides: May 2003 Edition

Our favorite video card continues to be the 9500/9600 Pro. Neither can hold up against the 9700 Pro, but the price/performance ratio is definitely excellent.At time of publication, the Sapphire 9500 Pro cards were running about $180 while the 9700 Pro Radeons were ranged anywhere between $270 and $350. You might want to check out our previous article on the Doom III benchmarks to see how these cards stack up against each other.

A few other interesting things for video cards are also coming together.The GeForceFX 5200 cards are quickly replacing the GeForce4 MX line. In fact, we are having trouble even finding MX cards anymore.We think the 5200 line is a strong competitor to ATI’s 9000 card.The GeForce4 line is not yet dead, however. A personal favorite, the ChainTech Ti4600 is priced under $150 at this time of publications.This is not a DirectX 9 compliant card, but it does pack a neat little punch.

The card we are waiting for is the FX 5600. In the past, we have always found the highest price/performance ratio in the “middle of the pack” cards. This includes the Radeon 9500 Pro and the GeForce4 Ti4400/4200.There have not been very many benchmarks yet, but for a card that is priced $20 less than the Radeon 9500 Pro, it would be nice to see if NVIDIA can regain the middle market crown.

As always, don’t forget to check out our RealTime Price Engine for up to the minute pricing on memory, video cards, CPUs and motherboards!