this will be a soft launch (e.g. card available for review), product won't be on the shelves (particularly in the UK) for a few months after
Stock will be available in decent quantity in Jan, simple as that and I'd bet on a few cards being available in December, personally I don't want to dump money on a 7970 full stop, without knowing the 7950 price. Really simple for me, if a 7950 is 10-15% slower, but anywhere from 20%+ cheaper, then its simply better value, assuming a good deal of the lower performance is clock speed, you clock it back up and you've got a much much better value card.
As for particularly in the UK, the UK actually tends to be a fairly big market, we often get better treatment and stock than most of Europe, the UK/US both often get very good stock vs population compared to basically all other companies in the world. If anywhere gets semi decent stock levels it will be the UK and US.
As for huge stock, no, firstly why would there be, and secondly, who cares.
THe 5850 had low stock on launch, I got one when I wanted, for below RRP and it was easy to find stock for all but around 2 weeks from launch to pretty much 4-5 months later. There wasn't "massive" stock of 6950/70's on launch, though much better, demand was decent, still managed to find and get one delivered very shortly after launch for, below RRP.
Cost, people need to stop banging on about cost, I'm in no way having a go at Gibbo or calling him crap, AT ALL but AMD, Nvidia, just about all companies with stock of old product and heavy competition play games with prices. Gibbo was flat out convinced the 6970 would be £350+ on launch, why, because that is what distributors were charging him, that is fair enough, and before launch AMD put a price drop through the channel. Its FAR from rare for that to happen. If we'll see a decent price drop before Jan 9th though and 7950's, who knows.
