14 DAY TRIAL // Don't you just love price wars? Somehow, they always end by allowing users to purchase better products for lower prices. Even more, if the products in question have similar performance levels, then definitely price wars are all the better for us. These days, we are witnessing NVIDIA and AMD fighting to draw more attention to their latest product lineups. With NVIDIA's GT200 series on the loose, AMD will have a difficult time in offering its new RV770-based cards at high prices.
Apparently, AMD has informed its channel partners that next week?s launch for the Radeon HD 4870 is going to bring forth a different price tag than the one previously announced. Instead of going for $329, ATI will offer the cards with a $299 price tag, as the aim is to position it better than where NVIDIA's GTX 260 is. AMD sees the GTX 260 as the main competitor for its HD 4870, which means that the GTX 280 will probably be the king of high-performance graphics, or so at least until AMD unleashes a dual core version of the HD 4870 GPU.
NVIDIA will also lower the price tag of its products, but not for its latest lineup. Instead, the Santa-Clara based graphics manufacturer is going to release a new version of the GeForce 9800 GTX card, which is going to be dubbed 9800 GTX+. The card is actually an overclocked 9800 GTX with a better price tag, set at $229. It will feature a GPU speed of 738MHz (as compared to the 675 MHz on the "regular" 9800 GTX), shaders clocked at 1836 MHz (1688 MHz) and 512 MB of GDDR3 memory, which will be clocked at 2200MHz (like the standard version).
Because of this card, NVIDIA will probably also lower the price for its standard 9800 GTX and set it at $199. Unfortunately, there is no word yet on the released date for the 9800 GTX+.