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Affordable Modern Graphics Cards
EconolineCrush writes "If graphics cards that cost more than a mortgage payment make your wallet quiver, it's worth checking out ATI's Radeon X700 and NVIDIA's GeForce 6600 series. Both are based on cut down versions of latest and greatest graphics chips, but at under $200, they sell for a fraction of the price of high-end cards. What's more, these $200 wonders outperform last year's $500 cards, sometimes by embarrassingly large margins. The Tech Report has in-depth reviews of both the GeForce 6600GT and Radeon X700 XT if you're in the market for a next-gen graphics card that's a little more affordable."
I agree. When putting together my last machine, I set a limit of what I would spend on a graphics card. I ended up with $200 as my limit. I bought a FX5600 which on my AMD 2500 (oc'd to about a 2800) runs Doom 3 at medium Quality at 1024x768 with hardly a slow down. I'm happy, especially considering the card is over a year old. The folks who spend $500+ on cards must have more disposable income than I, or less brains than my boss.
$500 rule....after you build your rig, every year afterward, set aside $500 for your upgrades. It depends on what you think was weakest or could be augmented when you built your rig. Every other year, I buy a new video card (200-300) and that leaves me a couple bucks to buy a new HD or peripheral. The other years, it's the ol' MOBO, CPU, and RAM upgrade. Keep to this plan, you won't have to buy a whole new system every three years, and have an above average gaming rig. I've been using the same case and 19" monitor for the last 5 years and haven't spent more than $500 a year upgrading it. I have a p4 2.8 with 1gb memory, 37gb 10k rpm raptor and 160 gb media hd, and a 9600pro (guess what next year is). If you're a college student, then saving money during the summer is key...It's tough to get the money together if you don't have a steady job, but with some discipline, it's the way to go.
is over 100 million on the new geforce cards. that is more than all P4 cpu's, except the p4ee which is 80% cache transistors. so start whining and bitching about cpu prices if you are gonna whine about gpu prices
Hate to break it to you, but some AC on Slashdot doesn't decide what "should" be with bussiness. Their cost is determined by two things:
1) What the market will pay.
2) To a much greater extent, what it costs to make.
It is EXPENSIVE to make those high end cards that push the limit. As time goes on their technology is refined and trickles down. The midrange and low end exist precisely because the high end exists.
Also this is nothing new. $500-$600 has always been the high end price AFAIK. When I first heard about 3d accelerators for consumers, the high end was the Voodoo 2, speicifcally 2 12MB Voodoo 2s SLI'd together. Well guess what? Each one was about $300, giving a total of $600.
But the thing is you don't need the high end to play games. It's there for those that want to spend teh scratch to have the latest greatest. I have a 9800 Pro, which is slower than either of these two cards here. There is no game I've encountered to date, including Doom 3 and FarCry, that isn't palyable on it. For that matter there's no game I've yet encountered that doesn't run quite well on it. Doom 3 runs nice at 1024x768 at high detail, FarCry likewise with most things at very high detail.
Now it doesn't run as good as my friend's 6800 Ultra. He can run them at higher resolutions, with more features like anti-aliasing, and at higher frame rates. However it's not like his $500 card is the minimum to make it work, it is the current best. My older, now low midrange card works fine.
And budget cards can work. You can get a 9600 Pro for around $100-$120 and that will run all games today. Again, you'll have to scale back the detail some more, but they'll still eb perfectly playable, and even look pretty good.
So get off the "There's no reason for the high end" kick. Sure there is: People want it and the technology eventually comes to the rest of us. DVD players did not start out costing $50, they costed $3000. As the technology matured and production went up, costs came down. Graphics cards are the same, but in a perpetual cycle.
In 1988, my computer was an Apple IIGS. It did 320x200 at 256 colours, and had no acceleration. My computer now does over 16 million colours at resolutions in excess of HDTV, and has a massive 3d acceleration subsystem that can render millions of triangles per second.
They both cost about the same amount of money.