Introduction

Welcome to the latest edition of the Price Guides.

In a time when technology is supposed to be getting cheaper and more powerful simultaneously, the industry seems to think differently in some areas. While the new generation of video cards from ATI and NVIDIA are both shining examples of hardware making leaps and bounds ahead of its own history, memory prices remain in the background to remind us of the glory days when RAM was bought and sold like popcorn.

With this guide, we will take a look at what bargains remain available and which products will give you the most performance for your dollar. As always, be sure to visit our Realtime Pricing Engine for the latest prices and deltas on everything you see here, and more.

Video Cards: ATI

Since the release of ATI's new flagship card (or cards, depending on your personal opinion), the X800 Pro has dominated print and internet ads and specials. Nontheless, the price is still much too high to consider for a price-oriented purchase.

For those of us on a decent budget, the Radeon 9800 Pro still takes the cake for its price:performance ratio. Most vendors are handing out these GPUs for around $200, depending on where you look, and they are able to handle pretty much every game currently available on the market.

If you're not looking to create a gaming beast, then the Sapphire Radeon 9600 Pro is still a very good card for its price. Capable of doing some light-to-medium gaming and more than ready to tackle 2D graphics, the 9600 is a reliable choice.

Video Cards: NVIDIA

Brand loyalty, and the fact that the GeForce 6800-series are neck-and-neck with the performance of ATI's X800s, brings the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra to mind. Just as powerful as its ATI brethren, the 6800 Ultra makes a solid addition to any gaming rig. Unfortunately, the cost is still far too prohibitive to jump on the bandwagon just yet, unless you're able to spend a lot of money for technology that will be somewhat outdated by the time any games come out that are capable of really stressing it.

Of course, you could always wait and see what NVIDIA comes out with to utilize their SLI technology, but don't expect prices for this to be anything short of astronomical, unless NVIDIA provides a way to lower the price for the 2^nd card.

Back to the real world, our recommendation for NVIDIA-based video cards has to go to the BFG GeForceFX 5900 Ultra 128MB. The 5900s are quite capable of giving ample frame rates in almost every current PC gaming title without sacrificing very much, if any, quality. If, however, you can wait a little while for prices to go down and other variations of the 6800 cards to arrive, it may very well be worth the time in money saved. This won't happen overnight, but even a couple of months can make a huge difference in finding the perfect deal. Additionally, PCI Express versions will soon trickle into the market, which is something to consider if you are building a new system from scratch instead of merely upgrading your existing rig. One card that is a good buy, which utilizes PCI Express, would be the Gigabyte GeForce PCX 5900. Priced competitively, this card would be a good option if you want to move into the PCI-E world right away.

As always, not everyone is shopping to get an extra 50 FPS out of their favorite game. In that case, we would recommend the AOpen GeForceFX 5700 128MB.

Memory

There was a time about a year ago when you could get a gig of ram for, well, just a few bucks. Sadly, that was last year (save for a few exceptions) and we are currently in 2004 and moving forward. The last few guides that covered memory have shown memory prices to be either stagnant or rising slowly; unfortunately this guide is no exception. There have been very few new product releases that could help to bring cost back into order. Additionally, DDR2 is far too expensive to catch on anytime soon outside of the foothold it already has in video memory.

None of this means that you can't still find a good deal now and again. PC3200 is currently our speed of choice, since it seems to strike the best balance between noticeable performance and cost. 1GB of total system memory is also preferable, since it can all but eliminate the use of the Windows swap/page file that can dramatically improve your system's responsiveness.

For this guide, Kingston's PC3200 1024MB Value is a very good deal for a single-stick configuration. If you want to utilize what performance gains can be had with a dual channel chipset, then a pair of Crucial PC3200 512MB Premier would fit the bill quite nicely. Both options are well-priced and capable of making sure your upgrade/new rig does not suffer from memory-related bottlenecks or excessive paging. In any case, two sticks of RAM would be more beneficial, since not only could it take advantage of dual DDR chipsets, but it can give you some level of redundancy should one stick fail. If these factors are not a major concern, and since both of these manufacturers provide very good warranty and replacement service, then either will do very well.