ATI Cuts Price of 4870
Xbit reports that ATI is dropping the price of the HD 4870 512MB card to $199, possibly to counter Nvidia’s recent price drop. Newegg already has the card for the lower price and possibly other vendors do too. We gave the Sapphire 4870 a Gold Award back in June so you know it’s a solid card.
ATI is working hard to capture 50% of the market of standalone desktop graphics adapters. One of the ways to gain market share is to slash prices of final products. In Q3 2008 Nvidia Corp. commanded 60% of shipments with its GeForce chips, whereas ATI Radeon’s share was about 40%, according to market tracker Jon Peddie Research.
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Publish Date: Sun, 07 Dec 2008 08:12:00 CST Read more...
In most games the 1Gb version of this card is only a few percent faster unless you're playing at resolutions above 1680x1050.
The 192 piped gtx260 is the best priced/power card at this level. But nvidia have been dicks again and brought out a slightly fatter version for more money and stopped the 192 version, even though the difference between the cards is at most 5%.
Buy the 192 gtx260 while you can if you're looking at this mid/high stuff right now as as a need rather than a want.
They did that because their manufacturing has improved enough that the aren't getting so many "bad" GPUs that only work with 192 cores enabled. They can pretty much just make the 216 core ones now. If they'd had their way though they'd all have been GTX280's, but even they knew having perfect yields is impossible.
That's what their press release says yeah, but that's bullshit imo.
They did it because they dropped the prices too far in a panic after ati rolled up with good cards. Then the price of the 260 fell too far in their scared attempts and this is their way of pushing the price back up for what is essentially the same damn card. Plus pushing the 280 more would do them no good, more people are going for mid/high not top of the line stuff because the cards are ahead of the curve on the games right now.
HereComesPete wrote:That's what their press release says yeah, but that's bullshit imo.
They did it because they dropped the prices too far in a panic after ati rolled up with good cards. Then the price of the 260 fell too far in their scared attempts and this is their way of pushing the price back up for what is essentially the same damn card. Plus pushing the 280 more would do them no good, more people are going for mid/high not top of the line stuff because the cards are ahead of the curve on the games right now.
Well, I'm not talking about their pricing scheme, just why they're not making any more 192 core 260's.
deject wrote:Well, I'm not talking about their pricing scheme, just why they're not making any more 192 core 260's.
But the two are entirely linked.
They can almost certainly make the new cores for the same (or less) money than the old ones, due to refinements in the processes involved making it viable.
There's little reason for the price increase apart from that they fucked themselves with violent price cuts earlier, now they're selling chips that cost them less, for more money, under the guise of a speed boost (see also 9800GT) which effectively doesn't exist in real world applications.
ATI Cuts Price of 4870
