Refering to the shader 3.0 theory of the "I have to have it now!". In my line of work and gaming experience a true gamer never uses the same card for more than 6 months. If you have a gaming card that is not as new as the FX 5950 or the ATI 9800XT, you are not considered a true hard core gamer. Reason for saying this is I own and operate Com-Tek Services here in Salt Lake City and I beta test several different games with clans and communities along with Gearbox on the Halo CE side of PC 1st person shooters.

Game players are fighting to get a 30 fps with their ATI 9600XT and The FX 5700 video cards, and the cards have to clearly work way to hard to get this frame rate. I am finding better game play a x800 XT and FX 6600 series cards than any other card. The key objective though is how deep is our pocket$.

ATI and Nvidia have all these neat toys sitting in their closets just waiting to release them to us. But here is the huge current problem in my opinion, they have released to much too soon. There is no gap for PCI Express.

What does a person do? Buy an x8000 XT PE (Platinum Edition) for $750.00 U.S. Dollars? or wait for the PCI-Express release? Answer? Buy every 6 months and sell your card on e-bay to the next wannabe hard core gamer.

For replies or comments about this article please e-mail me at christopher@comtekservices.net

Christopher Fields
Com-Tek Services