Friday, September 27th 2013
Radeon R9 290X Could Strike the $599.99 Price-point
AMD's next-generation flagship graphics card, the Radeon R9 290X, could strike a US $599.99 (or 499.99€, £399.99 before taxes) price-point, turning up the heat on the more expensive offerings by NVIDIA - GeForce GTX 780 and GTX TITAN. The card should be available from mid-October. Based on the new 28 nm "Hawaii" silicon, the card is expected to feature 2,816 GCN stream processors, spread across 44 SIMDs (11 computing units). Other specifications include 172 TMUs, 44 ROPs, and a 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 4 GB of memory, which likely achieves its >300 GB/s memory bandwidth with a 5.00 GHz memory clock. The company is expected to launch 6 GB variants of the card a little later.
Source:
Softpedia
95 Comments on Radeon R9 290X Could Strike the $599.99 Price-point
What the hell are they playing at? I'm sure some people will blindly buy but really? - it's not very intelligent to buy any tech without first having it peer reviewed.
I'd like to see Samsung's 7.2GHz GDDR5 chips on it...
Also, GDDR6 on PI, pl0x AMD...
Because it was a ES gpu and at conservative speeds, also so it maintains 260W TDP.
Those 1200mhz will OC to 1500mhz easy, presto over 400gb/s.
And they can always do a 8GB variant with that 512bit bus..
When Matt Skynner said, "I can't reveal a pricepoint but we're looking at more traditional enthusiast GPU pricepoints. … So this next-generation line is targeting more of the enthusiast market versus the ultra-enthusiast one."
$600 MSRP, while then higher for OEM customs is not holding true to his statement(s). And I will chastise AMD for it every chance I have until they come to their senses. Nvidia might do it and get away with it, but that doesn't make AMD vindicated to follow. While making what Matt Skynner said a crock!
Only thing I think Nvidia has up their sleeves is a fully fledged GK110 chip called Titan Ultra or whatever name they can think of. Count on the fact it wont be 785.
..but I ain't.
Titan has a lot of leg room. Alternatively, I said before, a GTX 780 with it's standard 3GB, the same cores as a Titan with mentioned bios revisions. Let the AIB's throw in custom components (VRM,s etc) and you have a GTX 785 or allow the AIB's to customise the Titan base product and Nvidia remove the DP compute to keep the K20x crowd happy.
Yes, Nvidia can easily up Titan's performance by 10-15% from Bios alone. Let partners play with hardware components and it's up by 15-25%. (Look at Radrok and Khemist's Unigine Valley scores, about 110-115 fps ave on 1080 4xAA Ultra quality).
More or less only because I want to see the 780 price drop so I can get another :)
Now, PCIe2... that may be another story. But I surely hope that, if it works, nobody is silly enough to buy a $600 Titan matching beast and slap that bad boy on a PCIe2 board. ;)
Reducing the VRAM from 6GB to 3GB, and neutering the FP64 capability could serve to provide a differentiator between the two models.
There are a lot of permutations possible. Likely depends on AMD's final pricing of the 290X and 290, how long it would take to put into action, and whether Nvidia see the effort viable versus the lifespan of the cards and sales potential. Allowing AIB's to raise voltage limits on cards built to handle the increased power (the 8+2, 12+2, 16+2 configs) helps Nvidia and AIB's but there still needs to be a reference card if Nvidia want widespread and continuing site review benchmark PR