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February Video Card Price GuideBy SharkyExtreme.com Staff February 23, 2006Welcome 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 or PriceGrabber, but instead looks to present a monthly 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 listed as PCIe, 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 mainstream Radeon X700 Pro/X1600 Pro, and extending all the way to the top-of-the-line Radeon X850 XT and X1800/X1900 cards. 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 X1800-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. February is another good month for ATI buyers, but with only an aggregate decrease of $149, it is still well back of the January, where we posted a total chart drop of over $350. In terms of individual cuts, there were thirteen double-digit price drops, but the dollar amounts were a bit smaller. The ATI Radeon X800 XL 256MB PCI Express ranked at the top with the $44 cut, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB OEM and ATI Radeon X850 XT 256MB PCI Express followed with drops of $34 and $31, respectively. On the other end of the scale, there were also five price increases that hit double digits, and strangely, these were the same type of last-generation Radeon 9800, X800 and X850-based cards that received most of the price cuts.
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