Introduction

Welcome back to another edition of the Price Guides.  This week, we have in-depth coverage of current generation video cards from ATI and NVIDIA.  As another reminder, the RealTime Price Guides is leaving the beta testing phase, and moving into production real soon!  We just implemented a little stronger Boolean logic in the search, so as of today, you can actually search with "NOT" clauses by prefixing a "-" to your search string.  For example, to search for all AMD products excluding Semprons, the search string would be "amd - Sempron". Please send us your comments and suggestions on how we can improve our engine.  Of course, you can always view the existing release of the engine here.  Furthermore, you can view the still beta QuickSearch RSS feed forum thread here.

Although we were promised competitive high end video cards from ATI almost three months ago, it looks like you can finally whet your appetite for the excessive (if your computer supports PCIe, that is). Unfortunately, even though we have availability on ATI video cards, price predictions are off almost by $100 and the new Radeons that were supposed to replace the X800 Pro and X800XT are not even close to competitive in price yet.  We will get into more detail concerning that in the ATI High End section.

On the low end of things, NVIDIA's TurboCache cards are in stores now in regular volume, so those of you who are just dying to try cards from last year's TurboCache launch will still have a chance.

PCIe High End Range

As promised, ATI's X800, X850XT and X800XL are here, albeit a little later than we had all expected. Hopefully, you have had the opportunity to read our introduction of the X800/X850 back in December as well as the X800XL follow up a few weeks later. The X800XL caught our interest as one of the strong price/performance cards, given its $299 estimated MSRP. Unfortunately, instead of a $299 GeForce 6800GT competitor, we have a $369 GeForce 6800GT competitor instead. Granted, almost everywhere we look, the Radeon X800XL [RTPE: Radeon X800XL] is very competitive with the GeForce 6800GT [RTPE: GeForce 6800GT]; and that's based on the fact that you can find the PCIe version of the 6800GT. For months, system builders were given priority from NVIDIA channel distributors over retail vendors, and we are just starting to see consistent availability now.

Prices are falling rapidly on the X800XL, and we will probably have a better feel for the market in the next couple of weeks. If the card stabilizes just under the GeForce 6800GT, we would be crushed, but at the rate that prices are dropping, it might do much better than that.



Even with the fact in mind that prices are still falling, the X800XL claims our top pick for this week's high end purchase. The Sapphire Radeon X800XL [RTPE: 100105] and the PowerColor X800XL [RTPE: R43C-TVD3D] are within a few dollars of each other, and you should be very pleased with either one of them.

Crossing the threshold from High End to Insanity, the X850XT began showing up at select merchants about two weeks ago. The best available pricing still puts the card in the mid $500 range, which is a ridiculous amount of money to spend on a video card.



You'll notice that we deliberately did not weigh SLI very high in this week's high end pick. With issues on nForce4 starting to surface, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense right now to throw all of your eggs into the SLI basket. Tumwater SLI support seems fine - but if you are an enthusiast willing to spend thousands of dollars on a high end workstation, you probably aren't running an Intel based system anyway. SLI is a nice, possible upgrade bonus if you already intend to purchase a 6600GT or a 6800GT, but we don't recommend investing in an SLI setup until some of the more mature motherboards and chipsets hit the retail market.

AGP High End

Unfortunately, even though we now have many options on the PCIe platform, current generation Radeons still have a few weeks before they begin to saturate the AGP market.  Thus, X800 Pros slated for gradual replacement by the X800XLs are still way overpriced.  The lowest prices on Radeon X800 Pro remained in the high $300s [RTPE: Radeon X800 Pro AGP], while the extremely prolific AGP GeForce 6800GTs continued to mop up the realistic high end AGP market with cards as low as $340 [RTPE: GeForce 6800GT AGP]. It's been a while since we looked at AGP 6800GT cards, and drivers have changed quite a bit since then. We did recently look at the PCIe counterpart in our X800XL preview and in our original X850 launch coverage.  

However, the real nail on the coffin for the X800 Pro are the benchmarks that we posted back in November detailing the GeForce 6600GT.  There's no mistake about it, the GeForce 6800GT is the best performer in the high end AGP sector, and the only way that that will possibly change is if the Radeon X800XL can beat it in price in the next couple weeks.  

PNY surprised us this week with a GeForce 6800GT [RTPE: VCG6800GAPB] priced considerably lower than anyone else on the market.

Save the few availability hiccups here and there, this card has certainly been on the move. PNY and eVGA almost always dictate the bottom line for retail NVIDIA video cards, so don't be surprised if most of the other GPU-only NVIDIA merchants start dipping in price as well in the next couple of weeks.  



The X800 Pro moved very slightly over the last month, particularly the Sapphire X800 Pro [RTPE: Sapphire Radeon X800 Pro 256MB AGP].  Given the fact that the X800 XL is expected to stabilize at the $299 price point, we would have to expect the X800 Pro to fall at least to that level or lower before it gets phased out. Unlike NVIDIA video cards, ATI video cards have fallen historically in price before hitting complete EOL; although, with the recent paper launches, we would be open to the thought that ATI has changed their marketing strategies a bit in the last few months.  A $250 Radeon X800 Pro would be an outstanding buy, but we wouldn't be surprised if ATI simply pulls the cards out of availability before they get anywhere near the $300 price point.  

Mid-Range

Now that the X700XT is officially dead, the X700 Pro lineup is the only sub-$200 PCIe competitor that ATI can call "mid-range".  The vanilla X800 PCIe cards are nowhere near the originally quoted $199 price range; some cards are priced as high as $355 (which puts them only a few dollars less than their XL counterparts) [RTPE: Radeon X800 -XL -XT -Pro - SE].  However, to be fair, we do need to emphasize that the retail launch for these products only occurred a few days ago.

On the AGP side of things, NVIDIA has another easy victory in the sub-$200 market.  Given that the Radeon 9800 Pro has actually increased in price over the last year, the GeForce 6600GT doesn't have to work too hard to corner the $199 price point.  For example, the Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro [RTPE: 100556] (which couldn't keep up to the GeForce 6600GT in November's benchmarks) continued to spike in price as availability dried up from two of its larger US distributors.  

The story looks even bleaker for the 256MB Radeons, although the 128MB 6600GTs are clearly targeted to compete with the 128MB Radeon 9800s. XFX dominates the 6600GT AGP landscape, and without a doubt, the card [RTPE: PVT43AND] remains our AGP mid-range pick.  It's too bad that there still is a $20 premium on AGP 6600GT's over their PCIe brethren, but unfortunately, we have to play the hand that we are dealt.



When we change gears and look at the PCIe mid-range, the choices aren't as clear cut.  Our retail Radeon X700 Pro exploration from a few months ago clearly demonstrated vast performance differences between the major manufacturers.  Sapphire consistently came out near the top in each of our benchmarks, occasionally even ahead of the GeForce 6600GT in DirectX benchmarks. If you don't plan on playing too many OpenGL games, the Sapphire X700 Pro [RTPE: 100595] clearly offers one of the most well-rounded cards that you can buy, particularly for the price.  This is only the 128MB version - which puts it very close to the Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB in terms of performance.    


If the Radeon X800 replaces the X700 Pro in the $199 price point, we would almost certainly expect the (relatively) new X700 Pro to drop in price rather than EOL; our roadmaps do not reveal any reason to stop the X700 Pro from sticking around. Fortunately, Pigeon Hole Principle applies to PC hardware economics too.

The Low End

Anand's benchmarks in December told us all that we needed to hear.  NVIDIA clearly dominates the low end PCIe market with their TurboCache solutions, and even if they didn't, the non-TurboCache cards still manage to out-muscle ATI's X300 lineup.  ATI's HyperMemory will be upon us soon (again), so in the meantime, we just have to wait and see.  At the very least, we are excited that the PCIe low end video cards are actually sub-$100 video cards.  Considering that the 6200 TC GPUs have only been available in mass quantities for a few weeks, we should start seeing $50 offerings in a few months for those really on a budget.  



AOpen leads the pack with their 64-bit and 32-bit options. Don't expect to get a particularly immersive experience in World of Warcraft - particularly considering that the cards are paging from your system memory; but for everyday computing and office productivity, TurboCache is your best bet. Our industry sources have hinted that mainstream NVIDIA IGP might be replaced by $50 TurboCache options in the near future, and given the raw power of the 6200 TC versus GMA900, TurboCache is probably the more economical purchase anyway.  Anand's benchmarks show that the TurboCache lineup scales very linearly, but the sweet spot for price and performance on the low end is right at the 64-bit range.  



If ATI's HyperMemory proves just as useful at TurboCache on the low end, we could be in for a real interesting battle.  ATI has a long roadmap of IGP chipsets ahead of them, so we know that they do not expect sub-$100 video cards to replace their IGP market.  However, with ATI just beginning to get a taste of NVIDIA's aggressiveness on the AMD platform (RS480), best laid plans could quickly change.