Thursday, January 29th 2015
AMD Cashes in On GTX 970 Drama, Cuts R9 290X Price
AMD decided to cash-in on the GeForce GTX 970 memory controversy, with a bold move and a cheap (albeit accurate) shot. The company is making its add-in board (AIB) partners lower pricing of its Radeon R9 290X graphics card, which offers comparable levels of performance to the GTX 970, down to as low as US $299.
And then there's a gentle reminder from AMD to graphics card buyers with $300-ish in their pockets. With AMD, "4 GB means 4 GB." AMD also emphasizes that the R9 290 and R9 290X can fill their 4 GB video memory to the last bit, and feature a 512-bit wide memory interface, which churns up 320 GB/s of memory bandwidth at reference clocks, something the GTX 970 can't achieve, even with its fancy texture compression mojo.
And then there's a gentle reminder from AMD to graphics card buyers with $300-ish in their pockets. With AMD, "4 GB means 4 GB." AMD also emphasizes that the R9 290 and R9 290X can fill their 4 GB video memory to the last bit, and feature a 512-bit wide memory interface, which churns up 320 GB/s of memory bandwidth at reference clocks, something the GTX 970 can't achieve, even with its fancy texture compression mojo.
181 Comments on AMD Cashes in On GTX 970 Drama, Cuts R9 290X Price
www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/amd-demonstrates-2014mar20.aspx Whats that bird that shoves it's head in sand ?, oh yes a ostrich.
Im kind of glad I bought my 290X when I did last year, long before the 970/980 came out because all these cards will be worthless once DX 12 cards come out very soon. At least I got a good year out of it, If you just bought a 970/980 when we are so close to Windows 10 and DX12, its going to be a very poor investment for you. DX 12 is a game changer.
We'll see DX9 game engines being ported over to DX12 and we'll be luck to get newer DX10 ported by 2016. Maybe Microsoft will pump money into a game to have DX12 native but it will just be a showcase product. At the earliest maybe we'll start seeing a handful of games by 2016 Holiday Season.
Oops forgot. DX12 is on XB1 so we are still going to get half ass ports. They are just going to take less effort to port.
If you get passed all that you still have to deal with Patch-apalooza
but that's not in the way of the thread, let stick to it.
For power consumption, the 290x uses ~8W more at idle, 43W more with multi-monitor, 67W playing a Bluray, 155W at max. Figure ~$1/yr/watt for 24/7 operation. It can be a lot depending on what you are doing with it.
www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GTX_970_STRIX_OC/23.html
If you want some ideas, look at reviews from owners on both sides and see what they say. Nvidia cards have fewer issues than AMD's.
www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127787
On top of that power consumption is already proven time and again to be a moot point except in small situations. In most cases you would have to run a card for such a high amount of time under load through the year to really equate to power differences becoming present on your bill. On top of that it normally would take years of doing that just to equate to a reasonable price difference between the cards especially when one card is cheaper than the other. Not to mention you have to include people who use Vsync or similar which alleviates a lot of stress off the GPU and lowers the power usage as well. The only major concern for power usage would be a PSU for users which a ~500watt is generally what a gamer buys and will run the card so its still a moot point.
Anyway, either way its funny AMD is doing this to cash up on people returning the card with that type of joke add. Either way I am sure they are going to get some sales with that price on their cards since they are still one of the best high resolution performing GPU's out there at the moment. Prices so good on high end gaming cards more people can join the fray and get some serious gaming cards for a good price. Dang, now I wish I wanted/needed one of those variants.