400 bucks for the 9700

Pricewatch has a couple of prices up for the 9700, the lowest is like 399! Wonder how long itll take them to drop to a reasonable price.

until the NV30 is released, they have no reason to drop the price... The longer we wait, the more we pay.

You have to wonder though. For the meager performance gains over the GF4 is anyone really going to buy one.

not really meager, i read about 25% avg, in some cases more and less.. still i wont pay that much for a vid card, never would.. over 250 i dont plan on paying for any one component for years to come

i wouldnt exactly call 25% meager (and that's with beta drivers)...but ill agree that i will only think of buying the card after NV30 and probably .13u 9700 come out so that i can actually afford it....

I would like to direct everyone's attention to this http://www.overclockers.com/tips068/

I agree with ElGriton, Honestly who cannot run thier games at the res they want and full detail with no glitches with a gf4? AA and antistrophy is what it is all about, and no card, not even the 9700(stock at least) can run a modern game with AA and antisrophy without a few hicups and jerks between frames. You need about 100 FPS to get completely fluent motion...yeah yeah I know your eye sees 24 fps...but that's constant every 1/24 it's looking to see if there's a new frame...and also that's with a blurred screen to help you out. With computers it's more like 60fps and that's EVERY 1/60 of a second there's a frame up there, your eye may barly see it but when it switches to the next it causes a blurring motion. If that frame isn;t upn in time your eye catches that and you notice...it ****es me off atleast to see a game slow down, with 100fps the hiccups and delays arn't noticed, so IMHO you need 100fps to play a fast pace game so that the video card isn't slowing you down.

I love playing games without hicups, I dont care how pretty it will look jerking around, i want it to be perfect with no hiccups more then I want pretty pictures. Who thinks the 9700 stock could deliver 4x AA (2x AA sucks you are hard pressed to notice) and all the fixins without any glitches? I don't think so, I even have my doubts on NV30 being able to do that...unless they do a scaled down version of AA where they only get the edges (which IIRC is what there tryign to do).

ElGriton said:

You have to wonder though. For the meager performance gains over the GF4 is anyone really going to buy one.

Click to expand...

That is..

Meager performance gains over the GF4 Ti4600..

Which is about as fast as the 4600 is over the 8500.

yeah, not even 15fps gain is worth the extra money, so i'll just wait for radeon 9700 to come and force nvidia to do a price drop, then get a gf4 4400 with all the video in/out goodies and software, MSI VTD that is

So is there any release date of the radeon 9700???

Don't forget guys...consumers paid $400 for the 4600, they will pay the same for the 9700. Unfortunately for ATI, there are a ton of people who have already purchased their GF4's who won't be upgrading and spending that cash. I think Matrox has a good idea here...add features that will set you apart in the marketplace; don't just make a faster card.

I'll stick with cards $100 or under. My retail Radeon 8500 for $99 shipped can play all the games I could ever want at 1024x768. I would love 1600x1200 in Unreal 2003 but you need a huge monitor to make that look good. I dont see why people need the latest greatest cards when it wont improve anything but benchmarks. Does it really matter if I get 100 FPS compaird to 150? Maybe I'll change my views with Unreal 2003 but even that should run fine on my rig.

Bender said:

I'll stick with cards $100 or under. My retail Radeon 8500 for $99 shipped can play all the games I could ever want at 1024x768. I would love 1600x1200 in Unreal 2003 but you need a huge monitor to make that look good. I dont see why people need the latest greatest cards when it wont improve anything but benchmarks. Does it really matter if I get 100 FPS compaird to 150? Maybe I'll change my views with Unreal 2003 but even that should run fine on my rig.

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That's almost always the recommendation I make to my friends who are looking for a good video-card solution. I've had my 8500 since a month after it came out and it still contends with the cards my friends are buying today -for the same price I paid ($193 shipped).

I just can't justify spending more than a hundred dollars on a card today when the new cards can't impress me more than the 8500 in the games we play. But, just like you said, when the new games come along...

To my friends who want that extra performance on the new games, I recommend waiting until that new game comes out before upgrading their cards. That way, they save money and don't have to stretch their pocketbooks now.

Preach it brother AarontheJC

Buy your cards for the games that are out, not what’s coming out a few months down the road. Unreal 2003 has been used in many 9700 versus TI 4600 tests but the game isn’t even out for another month? Its fun to look down the road and see what’s coming but that doesn’t mean you have to buy it. Staying on the bleeding edge is bleedin expensive.

man i still think most cards are to expensive to buy. i think ill just buy my gainward geforce 4 ti4200 golden sample slap a huge @$$ fan on it some ram sinks pump up the memory and core and i got a 186$ ti4600 or close to it

ElGriton said:

You have to wonder though. For the meager performance gains over the GF4 is anyone really going to buy one.

Click to expand...

I am. My Original Radeon 64DDR VIVO is getting tired.

I want to know who will buy it first and post benchies