DailyTech - Radeon 4870 Gets $50 Price Cut to $149, Radeon 4850 Will Drop to $129

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Hardware Radeon 4870 Gets $50 Price Cut to $149, Radeon 4850 Will Drop to $129
Thomas Gribble - March 2, 2009 6:49 AM

66 comment(s) - last by SiliconDoc.. on Mar 13 at 5:01 AM

ATI fights NVIDIA's rebranding with better pricing

DailyTech has learned from industry sources that ATI, the graphics division of AMD, is working with its board partners and several major e-tailers to lower prices on some key products.

The ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB will drop $50 in price, from the $199 segment down to $149. It will compete in this price point primarily against NVIDIA's GTS 250 1GB rebrand using the old G92 chip, variants of which were used in the 8800GT, 9800GT, 9800GTX, 9800GTX+, etc. However, the HD 4870 has been shown to surpass the performance of NVIDIA's GTX 260 line, and value seekers may choose to leave NVIDIA for a better price/performance point.

The Radeon 4870 uses GDDR5 to provide more video memory bandwidth than the GTX260, even though it has more RAM, a wider memory bus, and higher clocked memory.

The ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB will drop to $129, and is designed to compete at the same price point as NVIDIA's GTS 250 512MB version. The Radeon HD 4830 will be replaced by another part soon at a lower price point.

ATI's price cuts are anticipated to take effect early this week. One of our sources indicates that NVIDIA and its partners will unveil GTS250 parts at the CeBit tradeshow in Hannover, Germany on Tuesday.

	GTX 280	ATI Radeon 4870	GTX 260 Core 216	ATI Radeon HD 4850	9800 GTX+
Stream Processors	240	800	216	800	128
Texture Address / Filtering	80 / 80	40	72/72	40	64 / 64
ROPs	32	16	28	16	16
Core Clock	602MHz	750MHz	576MHz	625MHz	738MHz
Memory Clock	1107MHz	900MHz GDDR5 (3600MHz eff)	999MHz	993MHz GDDR3 (1986MHz eff)	1100MHz
Memory Bus Width	512-bit	256-bit	448-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Frame Buffer	1GB	512MB	896MB	512MB	512MB
Transistor Count	1.4B	956M	1.4B	956M	754M
Price Point	$349	$149	$199	$129	$169

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RE: The Price was Fine

By Reclaimer77 on 3/2/2009 9:49:50 PM , Rating: 1

quote:
anyone posting negatively towards ati in this thread must be angry because of their recent $$$+ nvidia purchase.

Not sure how you would come to that conclusion. I said they were great cards. Sorry if pointing out how they pushed an inefficient design ruffled your feathers.

Nvidia has had two cards fail on me. I'm now running a third RMA'd 9800 GT and looking to get out of it. So if you are thinking I'm an Nvidia fanboi, think again.

My point is both the GTX 260 and the 4870 are pretty much dead even on performance depending on who's doing the testing. So if the performance is equal, well your damn right I'm going to look at price, power consumption, operating temps, and build quality. It's not like I'm nitpicking about the color schemes here, these are pretty important factors in my opinion.

Goddamn you guys are so sensitive about your little fav brands sometimes.

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RE: The Price was Fine

By thelostjs on 3/3/2009 8:38:29 AM , Rating: 3

my 4850 is my first ati card.
i have had one nvidia card fail me.. after playing around in the video bios..

i really like their value add features..

but i dont see 55-100+ dollars of value add from -30w idle and -15load and physx(at this point)

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RE: The Price was Fine

By bankerdude on 3/5/2009 9:47:26 AM , Rating: 2

quote:
Nvidia has had two cards fail on me. I'm now running a third RMA'd 9800 GT and looking to get out of it.

Really? Do you overclock the piss out of your cards, or are you just unlucky? I've never had an Nvidia OR ATI card go bad on me, I even knocked a capacitor off of an old AGP 9800 SE one time and TAPED it back on (my soldering skills suck) and the card still works to this day. Maybe you should stick with integrated graphics.

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RE: The Price was Fine

By Reclaimer77 on 3/5/2009 6:14:43 PM , Rating: 1

Maybe you should pay freaking attention to what happens in the world.

Nvidia made a ton of bad GPU's, knew about it and tried to cover it up. Got sued by their shareholders and lost 30% of their stock price overnight.

It's called the NEWS. Might want to pay attention to it sometimes.

And gee, guess what, my video cards that failed had the bad GPU's in them.

quote:
Maybe you should stick with integrated graphics.

Maybe you shouldn't be an ignorant ass and assume things.

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RE: The Price was Fine

By bankerdude on 3/6/2009 12:32:30 PM , Rating: 2

Wow, who pissed in your Cheerios, fanboi? So hostile...

quote:
It's called the NEWS. Might want to pay attention to it sometimes.

Oh you mean like this article here: http://www.dailytech.com/Dell+HP+Lists+Reveal+Defe...

quote:
And gee, guess what, my video cards that failed had the bad GPU's in them

Lol, maybe you should set down the crackpipe for a minute and try to discern if there's a difference between MOBILE chips and DESKTOP chips.

quote:
Maybe you shouldn't be an ignorant ass and assume things

I assume you have limited brain capacity and function, but hey, whatever works for you, man.

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RE: The Price was Fine

By Cboath11 on 3/9/2009 12:06:22 AM , Rating: 2

Sorry i do not have a link at the ready atm but if you do some more searching around you will find out that the mobile GPU and desktop GPU more than likely used the same underfill, do not know for 100% as NVIDIA will not say if they do or not. But Desktop NVIDIA GPU cards are now starting to fail exactly as the mobile parts did. Laptops are usually hotter than comparable Desktops and get turned on and off alot more. What causes the failures, for the majority, is heat. Comp is turned on, GPU heats up, underfill expands, turned off and it contracts so the high lead underfill and soldering is failing. The connections are breaking way sooner, many years sooner, then they should. An example i read earlier today is to take a fork and bend it back and forth and eventually the metal breaks from the stress.

Because of the differences in how laptops and desktops are normally used it is taking longer for the desktop cards to fail, but they are starting to fail in higher than usual numbers.

Yeah someone is probably going to bash me because the underfill may not be "high lead". I got most of the info from http://www.theinquirer.net/. Granted the person that wrote the article is known to hate NVIDIA and the articles i read are a bit sensational, the basic info seems ot hold out from further googling. But there is a lawsuit concerning the failing parts, sort of. The lawsuit concerns that executives knew about the bad parts but hid that info from investors, securities fraud.

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