Holiday 2006 Shopping Guide: GPUs

High-End GPUs

Like we said with the Midrange GPUs, SLI and CrossFire probably aren't necessary even in the High-End GPU market these days. You can still look to buy one GPU now and plan on adding a second later, or if you already have one High-End GPU and you want to buy a second one now that is also reasonable. If you're looking to go out and buy a dual GPU setup right off the bat, however, in most instances you will be better off purchasing a single Extreme Performance GPU. We showed in our GeForce 8800 launch article that there are many instances where a single 8800 GTX is faster than X1950 XTX CrossFire and 7900 GTX SLI. Combine that with the fact that you don't have to worry about whether or not SLI/CrossFire will be supported in your game du jour, and once again we would take a single GPU that comes close in performance over two GPUs that may be faster in some cases, but will also consume more power and generate more heat and noise.

Not counting multi-GPU configurations, the High-End GPU market extends up to around $400. At the lower end of the price spectrum, there is a gray area where you could call certain cards either upper-midrange or lower-high-end designs. If we just forget about the semantics, though, the Radeon X1950 Pro is still one of the best overall cards. It offers competitive performance, and currently it is priced quite a bit cheaper than any of its direct competition. Most of the NVIDIA's 7900 cards are a bit difficult to recommend, given the current prices, making the 7950 GT the only GeForce card in this price range that we worth considering. Stock performance is going to be a tossup between the 7950 GT and X1950 Pro, but there are quite a few factory overclocked 7950 GT cards available and that helps to keep things interesting.


If you want more performance than the X1950 Pro, the X1950 XT 256MB cards cost about $40 more and give you a full 48 pixel shaders along with faster clock speeds, and they offer more bang for the buck than just about any other High-End GPU. If you want a 512MB GPU, Diamond and PowerColor make X1950 Pro 512MB cards that sell for around $270. X1900 XT/XTX cards with 512MB of RAM may also be available for $330-$400 if you can find them in stock. That's a pretty big "if", however, so you might find it easiest to simply move on to the X1950 XTX for about $375.


We don't have much love left for the 7900 GTX cards, as their prices are almost the same as the 8800 GTS cards and performance is definitely lower. If you're still after a 7900 GTX card, you might try picking up a 7900 GTO instead and give overclocking a shot. The GTO cards are becoming difficult to find, but for around $300 you can get near GTX performance. Some of the cards might even be rebadged GTX cards, so a BIOS flash would be all that's necessary to get them to behave like a full GTX. Your mileage may vary in such pursuits, and for most people we would recommend taking the next step and picking up a GeForce 8800 GTS rather than any of the more expensive High-End GPUs. After all, DirectX 10 and Windows Vista will be available in the next month or so, and the only cards that currently have DirectX 10 support are the GeForce 8800 models. If you can justify spending $300-$400 on a graphics card, you can probably justify spending $450 as well.

Once again, here's a quick summary of the High-End GPU market.

High-End GPUs
GPU	Pixel Shaders	Vertex Shaders	ROPs	Core Speed	RAM Speed	Memory Interface	Price
7900 GT	24	8	16	450	1320	256bit	$246
7950 GT	24	8	16	550	1400	256bit	$249
7800 GTX 512	24	8	16	550	1700	256bit	$460*
X1950 Pro	36	8	12	575	1380	256bit	$206
7900 GTO	24	8	16	650	1320	256bit	$310
X1900 XT 256MB	48	8	16	625	1450	256bit	$275
7900 GTX	24	8	16	650	1600	256bit	$430
X1900 XT	48	8	16	625	1450	256bit	$335
X1900 XTX	48	8	16	650	1550	256bit	$400
X1950 XT 256	48	8	16	625	1800	256bit	$259
X1950 XTX	48	8	16	650	2000	256bit	$378
X1950 XTX CF Edition	48	8	16	650	2000	256bit	$406