8800 series prices

[m1ldslide1]

I just realized that the 8800GTS 640 that I purchased in February is still the exact same price today - six months later! This means that card has been out for 7+ months and the price hasn't changed a bit, except for some rebate options. It's amazing what lack of competition will do for the consumer... I can't see any point in nvidia releasing the 8900 series until AMD puts out something competitive. They could just keep it in the lab, increasing clock speeds and shaders, until they really need it.

 

[MarcVenice]

Heh, that's not how marketing works. At some point it will be profitable for them to release a new videocard, be it now, tomorrow or in a few months. You are right though, if ATI hadn't dropped the ball we'd be looking at better prices right now. Perhaps the 2900pro and 2900gt will spice things up and force nvidia to lower prices on the 8800's so they can compete with ATI's cards.

On the other hand, it means your card will sell for a fair bit when you are in the market for a new one ^^

 

[manimal]

Ya Ive been thinking about selling my 640 for that reason alone, A refresh is down the pike and the games Im playing now are not GPU intensive so getting the most out of my gts right now could pay off when the price drops on em....hmmm what to do.

 

[woolfe9999]

Yup, you can thank AMD for the current state of affairs with the top end GF8 prices being remarkably static since they were released a year ago, and for us not seeing a refresh of this line. This was the first Radeon series since the AMD buyout, and I tend to doubt it's a coincidence that it's their first totally blown generation since pre-Radeon.

I am kind of worrying that come time for ATI to respond to Nvidia's next major release, we'll see some kind of announcement from AMD in typical corporate speak to the effect that they no longer believe that developing GPU's for the enthusiast market is profitable, and that they intend to focus on the mainstream market. I could be totally wrong, and I hope I am, but I just have this vision of AMD - being a much larger company than ATI - coming on board and their bean counters deciding to allocate their R&D budget to different priorities. It isn't so much like if was with 3dfx, where they got clobbered by Nvidia and went under, it's more like a larger and somewhat more stable company that is facing stiff competition from Intel maybe wanting to focus more on that arena rather than fight a two-front war with both Intel and Nvidia.

- woolfe

 

[Sonikku]

It's just like Nvidia to keep prices high and middle end choices low.

When AMD can't put out a great video card, Nvidia exploits the hell out of it and does a disservice to consumers.

When AMD can't put out a killer CPU Intel releases new models and lowers their prices anyway.