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March Video Card Price GuideBy SharkyExtreme.com Staff March 24, 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. March has been an excellent month for ATI buyers, and the aggregate chart decrease of $432 dollars is the best we've seen so far in 2006. The individual price cuts were hitting all over the place and it wasn't as if we had a few $100+ cuts and nothing else. In all, we charts sixteen double-digit price drops, and best of all, the new X1600, X1800 and X1900-based graphics cards took up the majority of positions in the top 10. The three big ones were the ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB PCIE (-$81), ATI Radeon X1800 XT 512MB CrossFire (-$70), and ATI Radeon X1900 XTX 512MB PCIe (-$63). There were also a few nice cuts on the older models, including some drops to Radeon X850 XT, AiW Radeon 9800 Pro, and Radeon 9600XT cards.
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