Price Guide, December 2005: Video Cards
by Haider Farhan on December 9, 2005 7:11 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
High-End Graphics
As we stated earlier, with prices of the ultra high-end and mid-range cards being so competitive, we do not recommend the purchase one of these high-end video cards. However, AGP users as yet do not have ultra high-end options.
AGP cards have developed a tendency to be priced significantly higher than their PCI-E counterparts. At the moment, your best AGP option would be an ATI Radeon X800XL 256MB [RTPE: 100-435508] going for about $285.
With the PCI-E X800XL cards, two caught our attention: the Sapphire Radeon X800XL 256MB [RTPE: 100105] and the Connect3D Radeon X800XL 256MB [RTPE: 3028C]. Both of these cards are on sale for about $240 shipped. If you're in the market for an All-In-Wonder card, for a little over $290, you can pick up the ATI Radeon X800XL 256MB A-I-W [RTPE: 100-714301]. We're noticing three 512MB cards from Abit, Gigabyte, and Sapphire, but we strongly recommend against them because of the high price tags. Besides, 512 MB cards have yet to show any real advantage over 256 MB cards; the only reason the latest ATI and NVIDIA cards perform better is because they have fast RAM, not because they have more RAM.
Upon further inspection, we note the X800XL A-I-W is on sale for $290. If you are looking for an All-In-Wonder, rather than the X800XL, we suggest the ATI Radeon X800XT 256MB A-I-W [RTPE: 100-714200] for the same price. The cheapest X800XT that we are seeing is exactly the same price as the MSI 7800GT we recommended on the previous page. It's a rather obvious decision which card to go with.
We would apply the same general rule with these 6800GT cards as we did with the X800XT cards. The cheapest card at the moment is the PNY GeForce 6800GT 256MB [RTPE: VCG6800GXPB] going for $274.00. $35 more gets you a 7800 GT, which is significantly faster. Unfortunately for the AGP holdouts, the cheapest 6800 GT is running $340, and you can get either of the new architectures. We wouldn't recommend spending that much money on outdated technology anyway, and with current prices you could likely get a PCI express motherboard and a 7800 GT for less than the price of a hypothetical 7800 GT AGP.
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bbomb - Friday, December 9, 2005 - link
God ATI's X800 line of cards is a mess. You have the X800, X800Pro, X800XT, X800XL, X800GTO, and the X800GTO2. I would have recommended an ATI card to my brother-in-law but with ATI having so many version of one core I just told him to get a 7800GT. I myself will switch from my X800 to Nvidia on my next purchase because ATI has made buying one of their cards a great big confusing mess. Pretty soon Anand will need a price guide just for ATI cards to help us sort out all of their crap.At least with Nvidia they dont have 6 version of one chip.
RandomFool - Friday, December 9, 2005 - link
ATI and Nvidia both have too many card with similar names.JarredWalton - Friday, December 9, 2005 - link
I don't mind the similar names... it's the stuff like 7800 GTX 256MB vs. 7800 GTX 512MB. No other card (that I'm aware of) has such a huge discrepancy in clock speed between cards that apparently only differ in the amount of RAM. Imagine:AMD Athlon 64 GTX 512K = 2.0 GHz with DDR400 support
AMD Athlon 64 GTX 1024K = 2.8 GHz with DDR600 support
That's about what we have right now with the two GTX cards.
Tanclearas - Friday, December 9, 2005 - link
6800, 6800GS, 6800XT, 6800GT, 6800 UltraGranted, that is only five (versus six), but I'd hardly say that's much better.
Live - Friday, December 9, 2005 - link
Add the 6800LE to that list and you got the magic number. ;)PrinceGaz - Saturday, December 10, 2005 - link
You can add the X800GT to ATI's X800 range making seven in total.JarredWalton - Saturday, December 10, 2005 - link
Actually, ATI is far worse. We missed several. In approximate order of power:X800 SE
X800
X800 GT
X800GTO
X800GTO2
X800Pro
X800XL
X800XT
X800XTPE
And don't forget:
X850Pro
X850XT
X850XTPE
Tanclearas - Saturday, December 10, 2005 - link
If you're going to include the Phantom Edition, then do not forget the 6800 Ultra Extreme. Once again, ATI is still worse, but not what I would call "far worse".Recommending an X850 wouldn't be as bad as recommending either an X800 or 6800. I believe that is why it was not included in this thread. Imagine telling someone to get an X800GT (not that you would, but just imagine). They go to the store without having X800GT written down. Was is GT? GTO? XT? Now imagine the same situation with the 6800GT. Was is GT? GS? XT?
It boggles my mind that ATI and Nvidia believe that such a huge range of cards is necessary. They already have three model levels (X300, X600, X800 and 6200, 6600, 6800 looking at the last generation), so why do they need to have 3+ levels in each of those categories? They could really simplify things with three model levels, and limiting each to two (or at MOST three) levels.
JarredWalton - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link
You do have to cut NVIDIA a bit of slack with the 6800 GS. They get to stop production of the more expensive 6800 GT and Ultra, since they drop to 12 physical pipelines and 110 nm. The X850 didn't really change anything from the X800; it was just a tweaked process and manufacturing release.Ideally, it would be nice to see no more than two or three low-end, midrange, and high-end cards from each company, with model names that make it clear what you're getting. It's sad when you can point to Intel and AMD names as being better. :p
RandomFool - Friday, December 9, 2005 - link
I'd really like to see a summary page on these things with a final recommendation for high, mid and low end systems. Something like: I"n the mid range area, the ATI-Nvidia Geforce X7800 GTO is nice."