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7970 prices

I am slightly concerned my self imposed limit of £699 for a 7990 won't be enough cash after seeing these prices.

Looks like the Mrs and Kids will have food on the table after all.
 
MissChief said:
All the reviews state the new cooler is vastly improved over the original 58xx cooler though?
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And louder from those I read.

I note 70+ left still at OCUK, if I recall the 5870 launch they sold out in under 2 hours. Checking around other etailers I see their stock figures are similar to yesterday, can't remember the last die shrink first release that didn't sell out on day 1.
 
straxusii yes I didn't expect them to sell out yesterday, they are very expensive and they are not causing the same buzz as the 5870 did back then. AMD's best chance to raise prices to a different market rate was with the 5870, I still think they could have easily priced the 5870 back then to £400 and got them to fly off the shelves. The question I have to ask myself about the 7970 as an ex-amd/ati fan, is can I live with their drivers that are hit and miss most of the time recently ? The reason I dumped my 5870 was the drivers and nothing to do with the GPU hardware, their hardware was great but hardware on poor drivers is not how I want to use my PC and the answer to my question clearly is no, not untill AMD can show they are making drivers work as they are promised to and not having to break one or more older programs to make another new one work as intended.


I like the look of the 7970 and the overclocking and CFX scaling seems pretty good on it and again I normally don't overclock GPUs because I like the stability and reliability of my system more then the extra 2-5 frames more that are not here or there most of the time. I also don't do SLI or CFX because I don't want a noisy system or a system that gets very hot and eats electricity. SLI and CFX in my book is not a lot of gains most of the time due to poor SLI/CFX profiles/support for games and the few games that show great scaling are normally showing really high frames anyway on a single card. Then any time you have more then one GPU in your system you have the added instabilities the system may show.

I think AMD have shot themsleves in the foot with their drivers to me and I really don't want to go threw their driver headaches again, unless they clearly show they have fixed a lot of their bugs and make sure things like hardware accelerated programs don't make the system unstable, eg flash player and browsers that use the GPU and other programs that can be accelerated with the GPU (Adobe suite of packages, photoshop etc.). Then they have the cheek to really price it high in the time the global economy is in recession.

Well the doubters have now seen the real price and as I said many months ago don't be surprised if this card costs £500+ and they all laughed and as I said this card won't be cheap and the new 28nm process maybe showing poor amounts of working silicon for all we know. AMD are now charging for a single GPU card what they charged for a dual GPU card and we use to laugh at how high the prices are for the dual GPUs. Yes I have in the past paid almost £500 for a GPU but never again, after only 6 months back then the card was taken over by a new card over twice as fast and with better image quality.

Waiting for Kepler here now and if they don't show really good gains from a GTX 580 again I won't be buying it untill one of the companies (AMD/NVIDIA) shows they can make a single GPU card that can run a 2560 x 1600 screen with all latest games set at high to ultra settings at over 60 FPS. The only reason I and many were hoping these cards on the 28nm process would be amazing was so I and others could update their screen from 1920 x 1200 to 2560 x 1600, resolution matters a lot to me and the windows desktop workspace. So far the 7970 is nothing more than an overclocked GTX 580 to me.
 
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Purgatory said:
straxusii yes I didn't expect them to sell out yesterday, they are very expensive and they are not causing the same buzz as the 5870 did back then. AMD's best chance to raise prices to a different market rate was with the 5870, I still think they could have easily priced the 5870 back then to £400 and got them to fly off the shelves.
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I couldn't agree more, everyone including ATI realised they had mispriced the 5870, it should have been £350 I think.

Purgatory said:
The question I have to ask myself about the 7970 as an ex-amd/ati fan, is can I live with their drivers that are hit and miss most of the time recently ? The reason I dumped my 5870 was the drivers and nothing to do with the GPU hardware
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Must admit I never had a major issue with drivers and my 5870, once they wouldn't install and I had to remove a directory but that was it. Since moving to the 480 again no issues with Nvidia drivers either.
 
How was the 5870 mispriced, it was a step-up in terms of performance and technology, also production process, but it was still more expensive than the previous generation.

Why do you even bother discussing the UK's prices and think that AMD has any direct impact on it. Consider what the US pricing was, AMD didn't make any mistakes with 5870s because they've clearly cut the price a bit (by $10) on the 6970s.

The only card that was mispriced was the 5850, it was only 15% behind its big brother and 5% when compared stock for stock. Priced over $100 lower than the 5870, it was either a good gesture on their part or just a marketing screw up.

Nonetheless, they've corrected their pricing with the next generation.
 
straxusii said:
Must admit I never had a major issue with drivers and my 5870, once they wouldn't install and I had to remove a directory but that was it. Since moving to the 480 again no issues with Nvidia drivers either.
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They were not major issues I had with it, more like niggles and bugs that should not be there and the constant driver updates that seem to break more things than they fixed. I found everytime they updated a driver some old game or program would not behave anymore, they seem to sweep old programs under the carpet just to make their drivers work for the new games and programs. I like my old games and programs and want to be able to use them on the latest drivers so my new programs and games can use the latest updates for them.

Also their support forums is a total joke and they never admit to a problem there and only way I managed to get them to fix certain issues was to write directly to their driver team with a full report of the problem and of course they would quietly add the fix for the problem I reported in a future update and later break it again.

I found since installing the GTX 580 I don't have any of these problems and their drivers just work with everything correctly so far (knock on wood), but if Nvidia go down the same route as AMD has taken they will also find I move away from them. So far very pleased with the GTX 580 and only niggle I have with it is I find the video playback quality is not as good as AMDs video quality but that is something I can live with and tweak out. I do hope Kepler when it comes out address the video playback quality and shows real gains over the 7970 and GTX 580 and of course shows good value for money. Then I will be bouncing up and down at OCUK and ordering one when they are out.
 
The problem isn't the price of the 7970. The problem is the UK price of it. It's just ridiculous. People get paid less here. Salaries are lower. And yet everything is so much more expensive. It's ridiculous and it sucks.
 
There still appears to be a lot of 7970 stock left, even at retailers who only had a few pieces to begin with. Supply outstripping demand immediately after launch can only mean one thing; prices will be snipped soon.
 
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555BUK said:
There still appears to be a lot of 7970 stock left, even at retailers who only had a few pieces to begin with. Supply outstripping demand immediately after launch can only mean one thing; prices will be snipped soon.
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It won't be until at least 7 days have passed or a lot of cards would be returned under DSR and purchased cheaper.
 
All the retailors with sensible pricing have sold out. Those with over inflated prices still have stock as people are willing to wait it out to get the sensible prices (around £430)
 
Not sure AMD's pricing will come down, but retailers might have learned a wee lesson that when it comes to GPU launch pricing a lot of people won't accept price gouging and will wait.
 
I think half the problem is that the 69xx are a great series of cards and there has been nothing that really pushes them to the limits.
Most people do not have eyefinity multi screen setups and are using a 1080p screen or less and the 79xx is complete overkill for this especially at £500...
 
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