Advanced Micro Devices is really giving NVIDIA's boards a beating

Nov 5, 2013 07:10 GMT  ·  By

Even before today, when it was assumed that the price of AMD's Radeon R9 290 would be of $450 / €450, it was believed that the sum was low enough to give NVIDIA more than a bit of trouble. But apparently this was not enough. Advanced Micro Devices officially released the Radeon R9 290 a short while ago, and gave it a price tag of $399 / €399.

Clearly, the Sunnyvale, California-based company was serious when it said it fully intended to steal more of the GPU market over the next six months.

With this price, not only will the similarly powerful GeForce GTX 780 look greedy (to say the least) at its price point of $499 / €499, but so will the GeForce GTX 770 (much weaker at $330 / €330).

We have to say that AMD has really blindsided us, and the industry as a whole, with its new pricing tactic.

First, the R9 290X comes out with a price of $550 / €550 (despite overcoming a $1,000 / €1,000 NVIDIA GTX Titan) and now this happens.

For those who want to know the technical details, the Radeon R9 290 is based on a slightly nerfed AMD Hawaii chip with 2,560 Graphics CoreNext stream processors, 4 GB of GDDR5 on a 512-bit interface, 64 ROPs, and 160 TMUs.

The GPU is clocked at 948 MHz and the memory at 5 GHz, leading to a bandwidth of 320 GB/s.

OEM boards have come out as well, but we'll get to those later. Custom-cooler ones, and units with different PCBs, will come out later this month too (November 2013).

Those, too, will be close to the $399 / €399 mark, probably with a premium of around $25 / €25 depending on how much overclocking is involved, and what special components are included (stronger VRM and the like).