is it me or did "basic" cards about triple in price?

I mean for the past couple years you "could" get away with a 150ish canadian dollar video card.
run every game at that time at full graphics without lag and be stuck playing ultra low quality within a year.

Now a while back (about 2 months tops) i got a 6200turbocache 256meg card without doing any reading or checking any benchmarks.
figured hey its a gforce 6 i need a pcie card with this new mobo it should do the job.
Quite frankly its the lamest piece of... ive ever seen. most 100$ agp cards beat it EASILY.
So taking the 6200 out of the basic video card for a temporary couple month solution this leaves us with the 6600 beeing the low budget temporary card as the 6200 cant even run 3 year old games at full graphics (not even counting AA)
So far from my shopping in canada i cant find a 6600gt for under 300$
300$ for a low end card? is it me thats getting ultra cheap with old age or does this not make sense?

This *cough* 6200 card can barely get 3k pts in 3dmark 2k3..........
Im getting better framerates on the airplane test in cpu mode!!!!

Somebody help me out here and recommend a good option that isnt gonna run me 500cad for a basic card?

or did i just get a totaly defective card or something?!

i'm not sure if i should break something or just get used to playing "miss pacman 3d" or "pong" till this madness ends.

i dont live in canada but i would think that maybe you could get a 6600gt for less the 300 but hey i may be wrong

a 6200 has only 4 pipes, its a piece of crap, yes

got my 6800le for $130 and it plays everything pretty damn good, even before unlocking and overclocking it.

a friend of mine got a 6200 and he hates it too.

The 6200 is like the 5200 and 9200 series...they simply suck. (must be the 2)

You can get a 6200 Turbbocache for $50 in the US, $30 refurbished from Newegg. Somebody give this man a few new places to shop!

I dont know what your talking about. Ncix.com sells 6600GT cards for $160 cdn all the time. they are always on sale and always going down in price. I paid about $300 for mine when they were a little newer, but mine has vivo. if you dont wnat that, they get as low as $150 with MIR.
hell, $230 gets you an x800gto.