In recent weeks, the most-discussed topic in the PC hardware world has been the memory allocation of nVidia’s GTX 970. AMD has taken advantage of the controversy by lowering the price of their R9 290X card. As a result, we have made some changes to our high-end GPU recommendations.
nVidia’s big Maxwell launch of the GeForce GTX 980 and 970 has gone very well for the company, giving gamers great performance at reasonable prices. The release of those two graphics cards made AMD’s flagship cards (290 and 290X) overpriced, and so we removed those two cards from the Logical Increments hardware guides. (We also removed the GTX 770 and 780, since those cards had been replaced at their price points.)
Bigger is always better, right? When it comes to your graphics card, this isn’t always the case. Both AMD and NVIDIA use easily marketable combinations of letters and numbers to identify their GPUs, but this does not mean that the numbers are easy to understand. This article will explain the subtle nuances in the names of performance graphics cards.
After months away, some old friends have returned to the US parts guide.
Prices of AMD graphics cards have been on a rollercoaster ride in recent months. The cryptocurrency craze in the US had caused a spike in demand for high-end video cards used to mine Bitcoins, Dogecoins, and the like, especially among AMD cards.
It was only on October 24 that AMD released the R9 290X, which delivered Titan-like performance for $500.
Today, AMD is releasing the R9 290, which delivers about 95% of the performance of the 290X, for only $400:
Image from VR-Zone’s review of the cards
AMD has released its latest cards, the R9 280X, R9 270X, and R7 260X. While the names are new and complicated, the chips inside are the same chips we have been seeing for the last two years.
The cards that have launched so far: R9 280X == 7970GE at $300 R9 270X == 7870 OC at $200 R7 260X == 7790 OC at $140.
Product: APU (CPU with a good iGPU)
Expected price: No data, but probably $60-$120 range, based on Llano and Trinity prices
