I hope AMD does a similar "Founders Edition" type product. The coolers on the NVIDIA Founders Edition cards are very pretty and I would like to see AMD do something similar. I recently bought an RX 480 and while the GPU itself performs quite well, I did wish that the cooler looked more premium.
Maybe with Vega?
I disagree because there was another negative side-effect of the FE marketing non-sense: much higher average prices which are closer to the FE price rather than NV's MSRP. Most 1070 cards are
$429.99-469.99, not $379.99. It's even worse for the 1080 as most cards are priced at more or less at
$679-699.99, not $599.99.
Since looks are subjective, we have to look at all the negatives of the "pretty" FE style cooler:
- no 0 dBA which preserves the fan's lifespan
- no removable fans / harder to clean the dust out
- hotter under load
- louder under idle and load
- higher ASP for all AIB SKUs because arguably the blower cards are 'overpriced trash' and inferior from an engineering perspective
The FE marketing strategy resulted in $329 970 actual market price in the $429-449 region or at least a 30% price increase. It's even worse for the 1080 once we look back at the already overpriced mid-range $499 680 that now costs $650-700.
For anyone who doesn't get satisfaction out of funding a firm's R&D or isn't a shareholder/employee with vested financial interests, the FE pricing was one of the worst things to happen to the GPU industry. It's pretty much a miracle if 1080Ti costs $649-699 at this point.
I thought the Fury X and Nano looked pretty damn good, but even though they both had good looking and performing coolers they got poor reviews for price/perf. Yet the throttling FE cooler gets sold out. Marketing... ^_^
It speaks volumes about consumer psychology and lack of logic when it comes to objective purchases when fans of a certain GPU firm defend $100 premium on a card which has a GPU cooler that's
miles worse than the cooler on a budget $113 GPU from the
same brand.
Do you think if Apple or Samsung had a better screen on a $113 smartphone than on their $650-700 flagships it would be celebrated by the media/smartphone buyers? :sneaky:
Titans are a huge money sink in general. They get outdone a few months later for something about half the price.
I personally have no problem with the Titan series even costing $4,000-5,000 USD. My issue is that the Titan consumer series is now used to justify the 50-100% price increases across all other market segments under it.
Textbook NV marketing play => Take $549 GTX580 3GB, rename it as the Titan series and ~double the price; then increase prices for all other segments. That's how $349 GTX570 became the $649 GTX980Ti and I predict the GTX1080Ti will be another cut-down GTX570 successor but priced even higher than $649 because it'll be a "deal" relative to the $699 GTX1080. We are seeing the same strategy now copied by Intel which introduced a new magical price bracket of $1,723.
Unlike a flagship Porsche 918, McLaren P1 or LaFerrari that serve as halo products for the brand but do not justify massive price increases for the rest of the line-up, the Titan series marketing purpose was to justify price increases for the entire line-up, and not only serve as a Halo product. It is why NV chose to compare a $1000 Titan X to the $379 1070 rather than comparing a real retail $429-449 1070 to an after-market $530 GTX980Ti
And it's only going to get worse if NV raises the Titan ePeen from $999 to $1299-1499. That just opens the door to price 1080Ti at $799-899. I guess we should feel happy supporting our favourite corporation by rewarding their investors. :thumbsup:
The last 2 Titans went like this:
late Feb 2013 $999 Kepler Titan
=> November 2013 $399 R9 290 that's faster
=> Sept 2014 $329 970 (meaning it was possible to buy 3x GTX970 for the price of a single Titan)
mid March 2015 $999 Maxwell Titan (in reality it sold much close to $1099)
=> June 2016 $400-450 1070 that's faster
There is no doubt that the Titan ePeen will be a repeat of the same. I am surprised NV doesn't do a Early Adopter/Founder Program at this point. Just release every new mid-range x80 flagship for $999 to Elite PC gamers and then release it to the public for $699 3 months later, x80Ti series for $1199, and then 3 months later $799-899. The same for the Titan series -> do $1999 for exclusive access and then $1499 3 months later.
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