Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1183
Price Guides October 2003: Video Cards
by Kristopher Kubicki and Howard Johnson on October 18, 2003 9:17 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
A couple days ago we had the opportunity to look at CPU and memory prices. Fortunately, today we are going to take the opportunity to look at the prices of our personal favorite subject, video cards.
As Anand likes to say, don’t buy a video card now for a game you want to play in 3 months. Generally speaking, if you follow the volatility of the GPU prices, you know that’s a good ideatm. This week we will start with ATI first, but to prevent any fanboy accusations, we will start with NVIDIA first next week.
ATI, unfortunately, has more product lines than you can shake a stick at. And believe us, the naming convention is a bit out of hand. Without further ado, let’s start with the ultra high end cards and work our way down.
As many of you know, there are three editions of the 9800 video cards floating around, the 9800 Pro, the 9800 XT and the 9800 SE. The fourth Ultra high end Radeon card, the 9800 non Pro, is akin to the Radeon 9500 Pro; fast, cheap and near impossible to find. It seems once ATI found out it was incredibly easy to turn your $250 9800 non-pro into a full blown 9800 Pro, they stopped their supply of the units.
In our opinion the Radeon 9800 SE (which only has 4 pipelines) really shouldn’t even be categorized with the other 3 cards. Only rarely does it outpace a Radeon 9600 Pro but still comes with a $20 premium over the 9600 Pro. There seems to be a few soft-mods around to upgrade your 4 piped 9800 SE to a 9800 Pro, but our best guess is the 9800 SE’s are cards based on chipsets that were unable to clock properly with all 8 pipes. Banking on the assumption that your 9800 SE will easily unlock to 8 pipelines is probably not a safe bet.
Finally, we have our two champions, the 9800 Pro and the 9800 XT. Of course the 9800 XT is just coming to market and in limited supply. For us, it’s a little hard to justify the near $500 price tag. Particularly since the 9800 Pro 128MB, which performs slightly worse than the XT, sells for $300 brand new. Granted, this still is not a bargain, but $300 firmly establishes our cap for what to spend on a ‘high end’ video card.
The good news is if you want a high end card you don’t have to spend $300 to get it. Usually, the Radeon 9700 Pro cards retail for about $250, putting them halfway between ATI’s most aggressive midrange card, and the ultra high end 9800 Pro. Aggressive midrange card, you say? As you might know, ATI unveiled the 9600 XT of course. (There is no particular reason why we keep linking to the Unreal2K3 benchmark, it just happens to have all the cards we keep talking about). ATI is starting to take preorders on the 9600 XT for $199 on their website, but we digress. Edit: Several readers have pointed out to me that the 9600 XT will be shipping with the single player version of Half Life 2. Naturally, if you were going to buy Half Life 2 anyway, you save yourself about $30 bucks or so by going with the XT card.
Derek and Anand trumped ATI’s 9600 XT the midrange champion, but as most of us conscious shoppers know, price can be a larger deciding factor than performance. Gigacube and Sapphire both market 9600 Pro cards for $50 less than the XT. It all depends if your $50 (25% percent of the cost) is worth 4 FPS in UT2K3 (13% percent performance). Nay, $150 is the right price for a midrange video card. However, in 8-10 weeks it sounds very plausible that the 9600 XT could fall to that magic $150 level.
The good thing about NVIDIA right now is at least their branding is not overly confusing. Product lines are a lot like menus at a restaurant. Too many choices can be a bad thing. If you’re a gamer and insist on NVIDIA, right now you only have four choices (ATI has about 10). NVIDIA’s new GeForce FX 5700 and 5950 cards will increase the product line, but we naturally do not know and cannot say when to expect those creatures.
At least the good news is that the GeForceFX 5900 and 5600 prices are coming down considerably. The 5900 non-Ultra cards are priced very aggressively with the Radeon 9800 Pro series, but at least in our benchmarks the 9800 Pro still pulls ahead.
We would like to see the 5600 Ultra come down in price to be a little more aggressive with the Radeon 9600 Pro series, but we should expect that with the advent of the two new GeForceFX cards from NVIDIA. Unfortunately, the Radeon 9600 Pro’s are priced even cheaper than the GeForceFX 5600s, which really puts NVIDIA at a price disadvantage.
Hopefully, we don’t have to get into a habit of taking a full week just to look at video card prices. Unfortunately with the 20+ different product lines between ATI and NVIDIA, following video cards takes a bit of energy. Let us also not forget about our friends XGI, who supposedly have quite a bit of backing from the Tier I motherboard/video card manufacturers. But that’s another thing we don’t know and can’t talk about.
Narrowing down what to buy is never the easy part. Right now ATI is laughing all the way to the bank. Our midrange video pick of the week is the 9600 Pro, at under $150. Quite naturally if NVIDIA gets their DX9 act together and can regain some of the ground lost, we would consider the GeForce FX cards a bit differently. But if you had to buy a midrange card now, right now, Radeon 9600 Pro is the way to go; even if the 9600 XT is available.
On the high end market, it’s a bit easier to call ATI the better choice, but it comes down to which card. The 9800 XT is clearly not the best option, at $500+. The Radeon 9800 non pro would typically be our choice, but it’s almost impossible to find; and the Radeon 9800 SE is kind of a sucker card with no advantage over the 9600 Pro. We still like the 9700 Pro a tad more than the 9800 Pro, mostly because of the $80 price difference. However, 9800’s are certainly dropping in price and it will only be a matter of time before the 9800 is our pick of the week. This, of course, is assuming it doesn’t get any competition from NVIDIA.
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