Introduction

We would like to welcome you to our latest rendition of our video card price guide, where we try to track down the best bargains available while also making a few suggestions of which cards to avoid and which to keep in mind. First, if you missed our last price guide when we took a look at the latest motherboard happenings, we mentioned that the RTPE was recently overhauled and is now faster than ever. So, for those whose excuse was the RTPE is unbearable to use due to its speed, no more excuses! Thanks to our RTPE administrator and other behind-the-scenes coders, the RTPE is just that much more enjoyable to use.

Before we get to the actual cards, we should also note that there are a couple of upcoming contenders that you might want to wait for. We can't say much about them right now, but anyone that follows the industry should know NVIDIA is launching some new cards very soon. What will the price and availability be like on the new cards? We can't say until after the launch, so if you're about ready to plunk down $700+ for a couple 7800 cards, you might want to wait a bit longer and see what happens.

As always, we like to begin our video card price guides with the ultra high-end graphics solutions all the way through the high-end, mid-range and ending with the low-end graphics cards. There are many cards to cover, so bear with us, and please do feel free to leave any comments or suggestions in the comment forum below or send us an e-mail at the e-mail address above. So here we go, starting off with the ultra high-end video cards...


Ultra High-End Graphics

At the time of our last video card price guide, we were only picking up on a single 7800 GS. As you can see below, there are a number of them in the market today and are averaging about $300. The 7800 GS is here to compete with the X850 XTPE and does a very good job at that. Although the X850 XTPE performs generally better, the advantage of the 7800 GS is that it's at a much lower price ($300 rather than $400 with the X850 XTPE), better features and has lower power requirements. Our very own Derek Wilson has written up a short, but sweet performance review of this card. Read more here.

The 7800 GT seems like a hot item these days, offering great performance at a decent value. The best price that we can see this week is for the eVGA GeForce 7800GT 256MB [RTPE: 256-P2-N518] going for an even $275 shipped. There are plenty of others in the $300 to about the $350 range. For something a bit different, there's also the 512MB 7800 GT from Asus [RTPE: EN7800GT DUAL/2DHTV/512]. It's a fairly large card and is not at a very friendly price tag either, going for about $820...yikes! Why so much? Because it has two 7800 GT chips on a single card. Given the $200 price premium, we'd rather have two individual 7800 GTs instead of an SLI-on-a-board solution.

With the 7800 GTX cards, there are many in about the $450 range. Leading the pack this week is the MSI GeForce 7800GTX 256MB [RTPE: NX7800GTX-VT2D256E] on sale for $385 after a $50 mail-in rebate. If you have the extra $100 to spare, rather than going with the 7800 GT, this MSI 7800 GTX looks like a great deal. There are also many different package options with these cards these days, and by looking at what extras they come with, it can help you make the final decision on which card would be best suitable for yourself.



Over here in the ATI section, the newly released X1900 cards are doing extremely well, price and performance-wise. The most reasonably priced X1900 XT this week is from Sapphire [RTPE: 100149]. Down about $74, it is currently on sale for about $454 shipped. While this is the cheapest that we can find, you can see that there are many others priced significantly higher, anywhere in the $500 to $600 range.

There are also a number of X1900 XTX cards available, and following in close behind the Sapphire X1900 XT, we have the Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX 512MB [RTPE: 100150] currently priced at $504 shipped. That is about an $85 drop...quite a bit for such cards that have been out on the market for only about one month.

If you are looking to go with a CrossFire setup, once again, the best deal that we can score this week is also from Sapphire. The Radeon X1900 CrossFire 512MB [RTPE: 100159] is going for about $564 shipped.



Here, we are at ATI's slightly older line-up, the X1800 graphics cards. With the way that some of these cards are priced, you would be much better off going with an X1900 XT or even an XTX; a real no-brainer. And because of that, we find it quite difficult for us to recommend anything here. Perhaps one of the X1800 XL, like the ATI Radeon X1800XL 256MB [RTPE: 100-435703] going for just over $300, seems reasonable.

There are also a few 512MB X1800 XT cards that are appearing along with a 512MB X1800 CrossFire. Again, we would suggest that you shy away from these only because of the way that they are priced. You can get better performance for about the same price by going with an X1900 variant.



With the options available today, we suggest that you don't purchase a 6800 Ultra. These cards, especially the 512MB flavors, are extremely overpriced. Definitely, look into the 7800 or X1900 lineup if you're willing to spend such a large amount of moola.





High-End Graphics

We are now at the high-end graphics cards and to start, we'll take a look at the X800 XL cards.

With the way that most of these graphics cards are priced, you're much better off going with a GeForce 7800 GT. We are seeing many of these cards between the $250 to $280 range, and at $275, you can pick up the eVGA 7800 GT that we mentioned on the previous page, giving you better performance at roughly the same price.

However, we do have a few X800 XL cards that have dropped to below $200, making them at least worth consideration. Sapphire, Gigabyte , and Abit all have competing products in that price range (which is actually down in the mid-range cost, but for now we'll leave them as high-end). With the pending launch of ATI's X1800 GTO, though, we'd suggest waiting a bit to see where that's priced, since it has a better feature set. Remember that the R4xx cards don't support SM3.0, which could become more important now that both ATI and NVIDIA are pushing the feature.



As we mentioned with the X800 XL and 6800 Ultra cards, we'll have to apply the same rule here. These X800 XT graphics cards are, once again, outrageously overpriced. Definitely look into an X1800, X1900 or 7800.



Ah-ha. Here we go again...there really isn't anything more that we can say. Overlook this batch of cards and either move on up to the ultra-high end cards to take a step back towards the mid-range cards, which we will look at on the following page.





Mid-Range Graphics

Finally - here, we can now see some reasonably priced graphics cards in the mid-range line-up. Starting this batch off, we'll begin with the X800 GT cards.

There are quite a few which are between $100 to about $150, not a bad price at all. The cheapest that we can find today is the Sapphire Radeon X800GT 128MB [RTPE: 100125SR] for about $110, which has seen about a $25 decrease. Following fairly close behind is the 256MB variant of the said card, also from Sapphire [RTPE: 100126], which is on sale for about $134. This is definitely not the lowest price at which we have seen this card priced, although nonetheless, it's still a great price and unquestionably one to consider.



The 6800 GS cards have proven themselves worthy time and time again. These can be a great alternative to ATI's X800 GT line-up. Ones to consider are the eVGA GeForce 6800GS 256MB [RTPE: 256-P2-N386] for you PCI-e users. We can see that this card is going for about $154 after a $15 mail-in rebate. AGP users are still in luck. This week, we are seeing the 6800 GS from XFX [RTPE: PV-T40B-UDF3], another excellent brand, going for roughly $219 shipped.



For a cheaper alternative to the 6800 GS, a 6600 GT can be an outstanding choice. To state the obvious, we recommend that you try to stay towards the low end of these prices because you will only end up paying the same premium for a 6800 GS card.



The X700 cards are fairly decent performers. We would say slightly worse than a 6600 GT, though they are still worth considering, especially for you hardcore ATI fans out there. Although unlike the 6600 GT graphics cards, there aren't many AGP cards out there. In fact, our RTPE is only picking up on a single X700 Pro. So if you are looking for a mid-range AGP card, price-wise, you would be slightly better off going with a 6600 GT



We have noticed that the X1600 cards from ATI aren't creating much of an impact within the mid-range market even though their prices are extremely low. It's actually quite obvious, the X1600 line-up isn't much of a performer and a 6800 GS would be something better to consider. These cards are competitive with the 6600GT, but with over twice the memory bandwidth the 6800 GS is simply out of reach.





Low-End Graphics

Nearing completion of this week's video card price guide, we'll be taking a look at the low-end graphic card options.

For the price of the AGP version of the X1300, we would suggest that you go with a 6600 GT. You'll get a much better bang for your buck in doing so. For the PCI-e users, we would recommend that you look into the X700 cards, which are going for about the same price as a PCI-e X1300 and offer more compelling performance.





These new GeForce 7300 GS graphics cards were created to replace the 6200 TurboCache cards. Price and performance-wise, they're not doing such a bad job at all. If you haven't already done so, do check out Josh Venning's recent article on the eVGA 7300 GS.





This wraps up with week's video card price guide. Join us again next week when we take a look into the world of storage media! Thanks for reading!