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April Video Card Price GuideBy SharkyExtreme.com Staff April 1, 2005Welcome to the Sharky Extreme Video Card Price Guide, which follows our current CPU and Memory guides by presenting a snap-shot of the overall market. This follows the same basic pattern as our CPU price guide, starting off with individual lists for both NVIDIA and ATI, then separating them into the various entry-level, mainstream and high-end market segments, and finishing up with a sorted price list combining all the cards. The video card price lists are not meant to duplicate the vendor selection of an online price engine like PriceWatch, but instead looks to present a view of the overall video card marketplace. The video cards and manufacturers in the price lists are selected due to video chip and brand popularity, market visibility, and overall positioning. In some cases, we only show the OEM price for less popular models, while including multiple retail cards at the hotter ends of the market. * Please note that unless otherwise stated (using an OEM designation) the listed video cards are full retail boxed editions, and unless expressly stated either way, are assumed to be AGP models. The ATI market starts with the Radeon 9X00-based video cards, ranging from the entry-level Radeon 9000 to the powerful Radeon 9800XT, and extending all the way to the top-of-the-line Radeon X850 XT Platinum. The following list is sorted by product line to give a full view of the various ATI-based options, and exactly which models include special All-in-Wonder editions and larger memory capacities. The Radeon 9X00 and X300 to X850-based cards featured in the list are the models that are readily available online, and we continue to drop last-generation cards that are extremely difficult to find. April is a much better month for ATI buyers than March ever was, and the price cuts hit a wide variety of models. This was most prevalent on many of the last generation cards like the Radeon 9500, 9700 and 9800-based models, although some of the top movers-and-shakers were from the X800 Pro, XL and XT families. In March we saw many older ATI cards rising in price, but this month has definitely reversed that trend, and it's a pretty good time to be buying last-gen specialty cards like the AiW Radeon 9700 Pro. The PCI Express and AGP models evened out in terms of overall price changes, but a couple of the X800-based PCIe cards really dropped over the last month. In terms of overall price list movement, the ATI list surpassed the NVIDIA side, taking back the crown it had lost for 3 straight months.
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