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February Video Card Price GuideBy SharkyExtreme.com Staff February 28, 2008Welcome to the Sharky Extreme Video Card Price Guide, which compliments our 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 AMD, 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 or AGP, are assumed to be the default format. The AMD-ATI market starts with the Radeon 9X00-based video cards, ranging from the entry-level Radeon X300/HD 2400 to the mainstream Radeon X1650 XT/HD 2600 XT, and extending all the way to the top-of-the-line HD 2900 and 3800-series cards. The following list is sorted by product line to give a full view of the various AMD-based options, and exactly which models include special All-in-Wonder editions and larger memory capacities. The Radeon HD 2400, 2600, 3800 and 2900-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. As ATI has effectively halted production on their popular All-in-Wonder brand, we have started listing prices for the TV Wonder 550, 600 and 650 HD cards. The ATI graphics card listings contained a wide range of price drops, with twelve of these reaching double digits, and three of them - the Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB (-$51), Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB (-$36) and ATI FireGL V5200 256MB (-$31) cards - falling by over $30. A trio of ATI cards dropped by $20 or more, and there was a nice selection of smaller cuts. The only large price increase hit the Radeon HD 2900 Pro 1GB card, which spiked by $53. This muted the overall effects of the price cuts, but the ATI chart still managed an aggregate decrease of $198, a nice improvement over the meager $18 total drop we posted in January.
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