Price Guide, December 2005: Video Cards
by Haider Farhan on December 9, 2005 7:11 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Low-End Graphics
Since our last price guide, we currently have three AIB manufacturer's producing the newly released X1300 graphics cards. Both the MSI Radeon X1300 Pro 256MB [RTPE: RX1300PRO-TD256E] on sale for about $110 and the Sapphire Radeon X1300 256MB [RTPE: 100141] going for $100, seem like respectable deals. Too bad they don't cost much less than the 6600 GT, which ends of being a faster card.
For those who have no real need for great graphics, these low-end cards should be suitable. They're better than onboard graphics and also have the TV-Out option which many people like to use to watch movies on their televisions.
And that wraps up another video card price guide. Stay tuned next week for our recommendations and pricing!
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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."