Tuesday, May 10th 2016
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GIGABYTE, GALAX, and Inno3D Announce GTX 1080 Founders Edition Cards
GIGABYTE, GALAX, and Inno3D announced their GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition graphics cards. With the GeForce 10 Series, NVIDIA is selling its reference-design GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 cards at a $100 premium over the "suggested" starting price of non-reference cards, branded as "Founders Edition." These are merely reference-design cards that look good, but will not have any technical advantage over non-reference cards. NVIDIA is milking the crowd that loves the NVIDIA brand, and prefers reference-design cards. The GTX 1080 Founders Edition card will be priced at US $699, when it goes on sale, on May 27, 2016. Non-reference cards will start at $599.
Sources:
1, 2
44 Comments on GIGABYTE, GALAX, and Inno3D Announce GTX 1080 Founders Edition Cards
In some ways it's like promoting predetermine price drop that perhaps won't metallize! While everyone thinks that $599 (14.5%) lower price over the release price of a FE, will be what AIB customs will go for... they won't! Most customs will end up being more $630-660. This is a price increase of like 20% over the old 980 MSRP. For the 1070 Supreme Lead Edition that a 36.5% price increase over it's $330 MSRP! While figure most AIB custom 1070's will price out like $400-430.
Let's hope AMD/RTG hold to what they've been touting "Affordable and Efficient GPU Design For Everyone!"
Also what was Nano release price again ? Ah, yes, less performance than Fury X with air cooler instead of water AIO but same price...
AMD are not saints. Radeon Pro, 2 x Fury X but £300 more expensive ...
Do people forget GTX680 came in at same price as HD7970 with more performance? I truly am amazed at the ignorance towards pricing people have with regards to a commercial commodity...
They're both out to make money.
"So for GTX 580 NVIDIA has done a lot of work under the hood to produce a card that looks less like the GTX 480 and more like the all-enclosed coolers we saw with the GTX 200 series; the grill, external heatpipes, and PCB ventilation holes are all gone from the GTX 580, and no one would hold it against you to mistake it for a GTX 285. The biggest change in making this possible is NVIDIA’s choice of heatsink: NVIDIA has ditched traditional heatpipes and gone to the new workhorse of vapor chamber cooling."
Even HD5970, 6950/6970 and 7970 all had vapor chambers. HD6950 cost $299 and HD6970 cost $379. NV is just charging a $70 premium for 1070 and $100 for 1080 extra and renamed Reference Card into Founders Edition. It's just a marketing play to add on $70-100 premiums and pretend vapor chamber cooling is something exotic when it isn't.
Cracking open the 6970 we find the PCB with the Cayman GPU at the center in all its 389mm2 glory. Moving on to the cooling apparatus, vapor chamber coolers are clearly in vogue this year. AMD already used a vapor chamber last year on the dual-GPU 5970, while this year both AMD and NVIDIA are using them on their high-end single-GPU products."
www.anandtech.com/show/4061/amds-radeon-hd-6970-radeon-hd-6950/11
"The 7970’s blower is a bit larger (~75mm) and the fins are slightly larger to make use of that space. Cracking open the 6970 we find the PCB with the Cayman GPU at the center in all its 389mm2 glory. As with the 6970 an aluminum heatsink sits on top of a vapor chamber cooler that draws heat from the GPU and other components towards the heatsink."
www.anandtech.com/show/5261/amd-radeon-hd-7970-review/14
This is just a way for NV to charge OEMs more $ because OEMs love to use a reference board in pre-built systems. It also means people who need the latest to show off on launch day/week and cannot wait 1 month for after market cards will be giving NV $70-100 extra. Great way for NV to milk its customer base. I have concerns that AIBs will just release after-market cards at $650-699 themselves since cards like the Gigabyte G1 will outperform the reference card in every way, suddenly making it seem like a great deal at $699 instead of $599 NV outlined for AIBs.
That's not even the point. Fact is NV raised prices from a reference 680 from $499 to $549 on the 980 and yet again to $599/$699 on the 1080. At the same time they severely neutered the 1070 with standard GDDR5 and only 2048 or maybe even 1920 CUDA cores. In short, NV raised the price of the 980 successor and 970 successor, and yet the 1070 is going to be way slower than the 1080 now. That's a lose-lose for both x70 and x80 cards compared to last generation. It's hard to be excited about paying $600-700 for a <340mm2 Pascal with 320GB/sec when we know Vega 10 and Big Pascal should have > 700GB/sec of HBM2 and a lot more performance.
Did everyone forget that AIBs do offer blower style cards. The only difference this time around is Nvidia publicly promising that they will make reference/FEs available until EOL. <-That's the big difference. AIBs after a period might not re-supply blower style cards if they don't sell well.
MSI, EVGA and others always have similar offering.
When it comes down to it, the $700 is an early adopter tax, as well as nVidia's way of not competing with their board partners at the outset. Allowing them to go as low as $600 (or lower, though not likely) with their own designs if they so choose.
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