Price Guides December 2003: The Year in Component Prices
by Kristopher Kubicki on December 25, 2003 11:02 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
For video cards, the last 12 months have been a battle zone. ATI did some serious damage to NVIDIA with the Radeon line in late 2002. NVIDIA's response with GeForceFX was perhaps not their best effort. As we all know, the GeForceFX 5800 was almost immediately replaced with the easier to product 5900 line. Unfortunately, less than 6 months later that line was replaced with the 5700 and 5950 lines. If this was core logic instead of GPUs, we could have easily mistaken NVIDIA for VIA.
What makes matters more confusing and perhaps less credible on behalf of NVIDIA was the introduction of various notations on their cards. The "Ultra" cards directly correlate with ATI's "Pro" notation; however other additions like XT and SE do not. The GeForceFX 5600 XT has no competition with a Radeon 9600 XT, and we feel the addition of such modifiers has basically only been to confuse consumers. NVIDIA has some excellent video cards, but unfortunately they are clearly banking on consumer ignorance and their own name recognition over ATI.
There are still some excellent NVIDIA cards. Our particular favorite, the GeForceFX 5900 NON-Ultra has been a spectacular sub-$200 card for several months now.
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SUOrangeman - Monday, December 29, 2003 - link
The new 74Gb Raptor should be much cheaper and widely available from more popular vendors now (i.e., NewEgg).-SUO
Phiro - Monday, December 29, 2003 - link
You need to look a little lower, divide. I saw one for $194 I believe.divide_by_zero - Sunday, December 28, 2003 - link
Perhaps it is a function of live updating in prices but..."There are still some excellent NVIDIA cards. Our particular favorite, the GeForceFX 5900 NON-Ultra has been a spectacular sub-$200 card for several months now."
And on the chart they range from $239.00 to $281.00
eBauer - Saturday, December 27, 2003 - link
$217 is OEM, $240 is retail I believe.Pumpkinierre - Friday, December 26, 2003 - link
You had the A64 3000+ (512k L2) at $217 3 days ago and now you say its $240. I imagine demand would be great on this cpu but is there an error in your reporting?