More Video Power Than Ever Under $300

http://www.lockergnome.com/theoracle/2011/01/18/more-video-power-than-ever-under-300/

The days of uber high dollar video cards for many is totally over, with the latest series of cards from both AMD and nVidia. Power and capacity has never been higher in the under $300 range, which brings many more shoppers into the market.

There are plenty of people that will consider laying out that amount for a video card, while the numbers that will consider $400 or more is very small indeed. It is a level that has always been there but the major graphics suppliers are being squeezed just a little with the availability of decent integrated graphics from Intel with the Sandy Bridge architecture.

This will continue to compress the market, and the differences will begin to make price points become every $30 –$35, instead of every $50. This is great for the buyers of video cards, but, as seen with the change from the AMD/ATi Radeon HD 6xxxx series over the HD 5xxx series, it doesn’t guarantee that the next generation of video cards will raise the overall performance bar. 

Still, the news of an AMD 1 GB Radeon HD 6970 with a suggested retail price at $279 will make those rabid, but not wealthy gamers very happy indeed.

This will follow the developing trend of dropping back on memory to build at a price point, but at 1 GB, it really cannot be said that these cards will be too restricted.

The news on this comes from TechConnect, which also speaks of the next lower bracket, which will bring cards of the HD 6870 series appearing with higher clock speeds and lowered retail prices than ever before -

Beside the half-memory Radeon HD 6970, we should also expect super-overclocked (940 – 975 MHz) Radeon HD 6870 cards coming from the likes of Sapphire, PowerColor and XFX which will be priced at $229 to $259. It will be interesting to see how will Nvidia position the GTX 560 Ti due to AMD’s moves. Three cheers for competition!

Competition is very nice for the gamer and for the consumer in general, but at some point there must be enough profit in the system for there to be continued innovation. While the costs are continuing to go down, we must remember that all things around the cards are going up, meaning the trend will not continue on forever.

Perhaps it’s time to start looking for that video card that will last through a couple of upgrade cycles, instead of just one, since the overall power differences are lessening, and money can be spent elsewhere until the next big innovation comes to video.

I’d like to see the hybrid versions of CrossFire and SLI begin to work at advertised levels, and without so much restriction between added video and the IGPs of the respective motherboards.

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