Radeon R9 290X Accidentally Priced at Online Retailer

[HKILLER]

700$...same price as a super clocked GTX 780 and it is stronger than titan...this is pretty good already but if the power consume and temp is low or not too high that would be the icing on the cake!i wonder how much better it would do with 6gb memory....

 

[Sakkura]

Funny thing is that your post is pretty ironic, since you are behaving like an nVidia fanboy. AMD's drivers aren't good for crossfire, but their single cards have been on par or better than nVidia at the same price point. As for 7990, the card is not officially launched by AMD yet. So you can't really blame them for those cards not working well. When AMD launch their reference 7990, they will definitely give drivers optimized for it (if they launch the card, considering the next series is just a week away). AMD has given nVidia pretty solid competition without going in the dirty game developer bribing business. AC 4 developer was given $5 million by nVidia to optimize it for their cards. I don't know if that means unoptimizing for AMD cards as well (I hope not because UBIsoft will be pretty stupid to piss their customers with AMD cards).

Actually, the 7990 was officially launched by AMD back in April. That was while Crossfire performance sucked, and they priced it to match the GTX 690. That was a pile of fail. But now they're in the process of fixing the Crossfire issues, and they gave the 7990 a big price cut. So it's not a complete waste anymore, even if it is still inelegant compared to the 690.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

HTML page for the page

"HTML source for the page" would sound much better imo

 

[Vladimir83]

Am staggered by how many people rant about the prices of this card?!
Firstly this R9 290X should be Titan direct competitor and even edge it out.So what do you expect?!?As far as i know Titan cost 1k$ thats 250$ more and without the game bundle.
Secondly,nvidia hardly follow the demand(at least til now) of GK110 based cards.Which only means that there are huge number of people willing to pay north of 1k$ for a card(s).
And yes i remember well those times when top tier card costs 350-400$.But those times are over,and if you expecting for AMD to give you 500$ card which beats Titan than see the real prices....and comes here just to rant about it...
Thats is call "troling"
P.S.good job AMD

 

[Sakkura]

Am staggered by how many people rant about the prices of this card?!
Firstly this R9 290X should be Titan direct competitor and even edge it out.So what do you expect?!?As far as i know Titan cost 1k$ thats 250$ more and without the game bundle.
Secondly,nvidia hardly follow the demand(at least til now) of GK110 based cards.Which only means that there are huge number of people willing to pay north of 1k$ for a card(s).
And yes i remember well those times when top tier card costs 350-400$.But those times are over,and if you expecting for AMD to give you 500$ card which beats Titan than see the real prices....and comes here just to rant about it...
Thats is call "troling"
P.S.good job AMD

The Titan was always a huge waste of money. So beating it in price/performance isn't impressive at all. Even the 780 is very poor value for money, and this suggests the 290X may not really outdo it much in that regard.

 

[thesuperguy]

Am staggered by how many people rant about the prices of this card?!
Firstly this R9 290X should be Titan direct competitor and even edge it out.So what do you expect?!?As far as i know Titan cost 1k$ thats 250$ more and without the game bundle.
Secondly,nvidia hardly follow the demand(at least til now) of GK110 based cards.Which only means that there are huge number of people willing to pay north of 1k$ for a card(s).
And yes i remember well those times when top tier card costs 350-400$.But those times are over,and if you expecting for AMD to give you 500$ card which beats Titan than see the real prices....and comes here just to rant about it...
Thats is call "troling"
P.S.good job AMD

The Titan was always a huge waste of money. So beating it in price/performance isn't impressive at all. Even the 780 is very poor value for money, and this suggests the 290X may not really outdo it much in that regard.

If I remember correctly, it is the R9 290 that is supposed to be on level with 780 performance. If you are basing your entire argument on the price of the 290x vs the 780, then where does the actual competitor of the 780 in terms of performance come in? You cannot base your argument on a titan level card vs a 780 when you could compare titan level with titan level and 780 level with 780 level, as it should be.

 

[xcerpt]

I gave up on AMD when I tried to add another HD5850 to my rig for CF for BF3
The game was unplayable. That's when I bought a gtx 680 . Now I just dropped another Gtx 680 in it for sli and what do you know it runs BF4 beta at ultra settings without a hiccup. AMD drivers do suck I seen it. Especially for CF!

 

[xcerpt]

I gave up on AMD when I tried to add another HD5850 to my rig for CF for BF3
The game was unplayable. That's when I bought a gtx 680 . Now I just dropped another Gtx 680 in it for sli and what do you know it runs BF4 beta at ultra settings without a hiccup. AMD drivers do suck I seen it. Especially for CF!

 

[rokit]

Story of success.
Bad drivers = bad piar. I gave up on Nvidia when after driver update my GTX460 fried. All games were unplayable. Thats when i bought a card from AMD. And you know, everything runs smooth and i don't fear to update drivers anymore.
The fun part is that it was second burned card from Nvidia i had. There was another one long time ago. Then I had ATI that just worked and some cards ago when i tried Nvidia card again "one way to hell" driver update happened. Conclusion - Nvidia never learns, for long.

 

[Mousemonkey]

Story of success.
Bad drivers = bad piar. I gave up on Nvidia when after driver update my GTX460 fried. All games were unplayable. Thats when i bought a card from AMD. And you know, everything runs smooth and i don't fear to update drivers anymore.
The fun part is that it was second burned card from Nvidia i had. There was another one long time ago. Then I had ATI that just worked and some cards ago when i tried Nvidia card again "one way to hell" driver update happened. Conclusion - Nvidia never learns, for long.

A conclusion based on two cards, interesting.

 

[rokit]

@Mousemonkey
Glad you see it. It was a way to show how bs a comment before me was made, even written in the same way for clarity.
Both companies have bugs through drivers/hardware, doesn't mean you can mock them for ever because of such things.

 

[Mousemonkey]

Then why do people mock Nvidia? Is it not for what they consider to to be ongoing issues that they say have never changed?

 

[rokit]

@Mousemonkey
Its because when someone brings back bad things from the past about one company naturally someone brings up bad things about the other one. But the ones who usually start it are Nvidia fans about AMD bad drivers, so bad, that its strange someone can use them and not experianced those problems.
What Nvidia is 'constantly' mocked for is that they try to play Intel somewhere they can't because products of rival company are just as competetive. Also for the recent behavior, it wasn't few years ago, Nvidia tries to downplay consoles and AMD while trying to squeeze to the same market that they aren't interested in. In this very year there were 2 themes constantly popping in the net: "XBoxOne: Not a day without fail series" and "Nvidia: its not that i want on console market, you baka baka *run away crying*".
AMD usually pops up in "AMD: monthly improvement of opensource drivers" and poped up recently in "AMD: drivers put cards performance higher than rival ones", so the only thing you can downplay them is remembering the very past of the company that was merged with AMD or some rare driver failures that both companies have. The only thing i probably agree about even todays driver fail moment is that under Linux with vsync=on both file browser and internet one aren't really smooth on pre 7xxx series, thankfully opensource one catchs up and don't have any bugs of such, in fact it tends to outperform the blob in a few cases. But that doesn't make their whole drivers a big fail moment, searching/reporting through bugs on needed programs i constantly see Nvidia drivers causing problems as much as AMD ones and some of those reports are re-adressing to driver teams. Living software always have bugs, no exceptions.

 

[Sakkura]

If I remember correctly, it is the R9 290 that is supposed to be on level with 780 performance. If you are basing your entire argument on the price of the 290x vs the 780, then where does the actual competitor of the 780 in terms of performance come in? You cannot base your argument on a titan level card vs a 780 when you could compare titan level with titan level and 780 level with 780 level, as it should be.

I'm comparing value, not straight performance. It doesn't matter if you have the fastest graphics card in the world, if it's exorbitantly expensive it'll be very poor value and should be ignored by everyone who isn't made of money.

The Titan is much worse value than the 780, which is much worse value than the 770. Comparing these new cards to the 780 in terms of value is giving them the benefit of the doubt. They really should deliver better value for this to be an interesting launch.

Now, there is no reliable data as to the performance they'll offer, and even the pricing is not exactly clear. So I'm not counting them out, just saying that with these apparently high prices, their performance had better be impressive if AMD wants them to be relevant.

 

[vmem]

I'm comparing value, not straight performance. It doesn't matter if you have the fastest graphics card in the world, if it's exorbitantly expensive it'll be very poor value and should be ignored by everyone who isn't made of money.

The Titan is much worse value than the 780, which is much worse value than the 770. Comparing these new cards to the 780 in terms of value is giving them the benefit of the doubt. They really should deliver better value for this to be an interesting launch.

Now, there is no reliable data as to the performance they'll offer, and even the pricing is not exactly clear. So I'm not counting them out, just saying that with these apparently high prices, their performance had better be impressive if AMD wants them to be relevant.

I'd like to point something out here: Value is both a 'function' of performance/cost, as well as a function of desire (need/want) over cost.

while you're right that the Titan is terrible value over the 780, and the 780 terrible value over the 770, the only reason we love the 770 so much is because it is CAPABLE of playing just about every game on the market at the generally accepted settings: 1080p, highest textures with some amount of AA. if we're talking absolute performance/cost only, something around a Radeon 7850 is actually the top of the market.

If the new gen consoles, combined with the rise of 4K, bring our need/want for better GPUs to a new level, the value equation will shift toward the gtx 780 range. I'm not made of money, and neither are most of the users here, but it's one thing to talk about high-end cards that we don't need, it's a whole other thing when the card we have forces us to switch to medium/low settings. it's not like all of us here on Tom's are working minimum wage jobs here. many of us CAN afford a Titan if we really REALLY want to; it's just a terrible idea atm. Imagine how that'd change if the Titan is the only card on the market that would run skyrim/bf3-4/metro/sleeping dogs etc etc at high settings.

my point is, as demand for higher-end GPU rises, Nvidia and AMD will do everything they can to milk our desires

 

[somebodyspecial]

now I have seen benchmarks before and I am not the type of person to spend that much on a gpu. However this card is be shown off as a Titan comparable card and if that is true. I don't think price really matters. People in the high end market are not looking for price to performance they are look for performance. So what the R9 290X need to do is beat the Titan or 780 and it will sell.

NV will sell well because they have drivers that work correctly. Why do you think AMD gives away all the games? It's not because they like you, they have to! Most would rather buy NV and forget the games knowing they are having less driver issues (currently?). NV owns 65% of the discrete market for a reason (and it certainly isn't their free games included with each card).

BAD drivers=BAD PR. It's not rocket science. Queue typical NV haters...LOL. It sucks AMD people, but these are the facts of life for AMD owners for 2yrs and still waiting for last gen to get ironed out even as they're about to release a new gen while claiming their cards are tops for multicard pc's etc. NV couldn't launch an "AMD DRIVER SUCKS" campaign if they were problem free already. You can call it dirty, underhanded etc, but if the shoe fits...

Funny thing is that your post is pretty ironic, since you are behaving like an nVidia fanboy. AMD's drivers aren't good for crossfire, but their single cards have been on par or better than nVidia at the same price point. As for 7990, the card is not officially launched by AMD yet. So you can't really blame them for those cards not working well. When AMD launch their reference 7990, they will definitely give drivers optimized for it (if they launch the card, considering the next series is just a week away). AMD has given nVidia pretty solid competition without going in the dirty game developer bribing business. AC 4 developer was given $5 million by nVidia to optimize it for their cards. I don't know if that means unoptimizing for AMD cards as well (I hope not because UBIsoft will be pretty stupid to piss their customers with AMD cards).

Um...First AMD paid a rumored 8mil to get BF4 MANTLE optimized. NUFF SIAD on that topic. Everyone does this, it isn't dirty IMHO. But that's exactly why AMD will fail with mantle. How many times can you pay 8mil to get optimizations when you MAKE ZERO because you charge too little for your cards and GIVE away free games?.

My post is not FANBOY crap. It's the truth. When you have a dozen sites writing over and over about your drivers people flock to your enemy justified or not. Most people don't even read past headlines. They get "amd has driver issues, fix coming soon" repeatedly for months and in this case the fix didn't fix the fix, so you then have dozens of "amd still doesn't fix winxp, dx9, multimonitor - next fix coming soon" etc. Then crap like "origin dumps AMD for NV". If you really believe this crap doesn't hurt sales (or force you to give yet more FREE games away, or lower prices) then you are either naive or really STUPID.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2052184/whats-behind-origin-pcs-decision-to-so-publicly-dump-amd-video-cards-.html
Add insult to injury with data showing a 2nd vendor saying your failure rate is nearing 2x higher and you can see why the first vendor dumped you. It just keeps adding up, whether you like AMD or not. And I like AMD, I just hate the people running their company into the ground.

And even if they didn't have things quite as bad as they are, with all the people saying bad stuff you end up like a guy accused of rape who is found innocent a year later. People only remember you got accused and treat you as guilty (same with any crime I guess). It just keeps following you around for a long time in a large portion of minds. If AMD's new card REALLY is faster than Titan, why is it $300 less? ALL OF THE ABOVE is why. Get it? It's funny, every time someone says something bad about AMD they are a NV fanboy 10 seconds later...ROFL. I own a radeon 5850 currently, though freely admit I go whatever way is the best bang for buck at the time (same with cpus). Though I'll also add I'm going NV with maxwell if only due to all the crap I keep seeing and also they AMD is well documented as far later with each game update in their drivers. Hardocp and others have covered the fact that at times they are 6months or more to optimize for a new game. Origin's staff outline this also as a reason for dropping AMD (along with heat, stability and drivers themselves). It doesn't matter that Origin likely doesn't make more than 10,000 pc's a year (my guess). What matters is a GAMING Boutique vendor dumped you and they should know a thing or two about HIGH-END pc's right? Immediately people think "WTF, I guess I don't want AMD then as a gamer".

http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/7000/7990/pages/radeon-7990.aspx
AMD 7990 has been official for a long while. What are you smoking? Only the first cards were NOT official early on.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6915/amd-radeon-hd-7990-review-7990-gets-official
Anandtech's review of the OFFICAL 7990 in April...ROFL. I don't know why I'm bothering with you. You are one of the people I'm talking about who don't read. You're just on the wrong side...LOL. It appears you don't even read the headlines I mentioned. I'm sure Toms reviewed it also, anandtech just popped up first in google...LOL (I actually prefer Tomshardware to anandtech who really kiss AMD's ARSE these days).

 

[Mousemonkey]

That's some interesting numbers in that link, it's a good thing I didn't post them first eh? That would have gone down like a fart in a crowded lift (elevator for those across the pond).

 

[Gabriel Modinbarzen]

Doods the price isnt even set yet might be 699 599 499 even... CALM YOURE TITS

 

[Vladimir83]

I'm comparing value, not straight performance. It doesn't matter if you have the fastest graphics card in the world, if it's exorbitantly expensive it'll be very poor value and should be ignored by everyone who isn't made of money.

The Titan is much worse value than the 780, which is much worse value than the 770. Comparing these new cards to the 780 in terms of value is giving them the benefit of the doubt. They really should deliver better value for this to be an interesting launch.

Now, there is no reliable data as to the performance they'll offer, and even the pricing is not exactly clear. So I'm not counting them out, just saying that with these apparently high prices, their performance had better be impressive if AMD wants them to be relevant.

I'd like to point something out here: Value is both a 'function' of performance/cost, as well as a function of desire (need/want) over cost.

while you're right that the Titan is terrible value over the 780, and the 780 terrible value over the 770, the only reason we love the 770 so much is because it is CAPABLE of playing just about every game on the market at the generally accepted settings: 1080p, highest textures with some amount of AA. if we're talking absolute performance/cost only, something around a Radeon 7850 is actually the top of the market.

If the new gen consoles, combined with the rise of 4K, bring our need/want for better GPUs to a new level, the value equation will shift toward the gtx 780 range. I'm not made of money, and neither are most of the users here, but it's one thing to talk about high-end cards that we don't need, it's a whole other thing when the card we have forces us to switch to medium/low settings. it's not like all of us here on Tom's are working minimum wage jobs here. many of us CAN afford a Titan if we really REALLY want to; it's just a terrible idea atm. Imagine how that'd change if the Titan is the only card on the market that would run skyrim/bf3-4/metro/sleeping dogs etc etc at high settings.

my point is, as demand for higher-end GPU rises, Nvidia and AMD will do everything they can to milk our desires

Ive couldn't say it better 😉

P.S.and all those sky rocketing prices is because of slowing in the manufacturing processes as we nearing the physics limit in lithography.Yes,with time the price goes down as the production is ramped up,but we should remember that those GPUs are actually huge pieces of silicon with ~7 billion transistors on it.
So the bad news is that the prices of video cards would only rise with every new generation

 

[Tc17]

I'm guessing there is a high chance of some illegal price fixing going on between AMD and Nvidia.

 

[jimmysmitty]

I'm guessing there is a high chance of some illegal price fixing going on between AMD and Nvidia.

Interestingly enough, they were under fire for this a bit ago. Let me open my digital archives and see.......

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-amd-ati-graphics,6311.html

Yep. And I love this excerpt:

"Both of us have spent the last three years trying to bring the perceived value of our products up to the level of Intel. The "GPU" category is clean and has served us well that way. We both have increased the price of our high end product several fold over the last 4 years while Intel’s high end prices have more than halved. Creating another category serves to work contradictory to that. How does one cleanly position it versus a GPU and a CPU?? It will tear down what we have both built."

CPUs keep getting cheaper for more power. Quad cores hit the scene at $1K, not you can get a high end quad core that runs circles around that one for $350 and a six core for $570 (Intel of course). AMDs 8 core, well its a 8ish core but still the performance is higher for less.

But if we take the same time period (2007) for GPUs and price the top end vs now, its not the same decline of price for more power. In 2007 a HD2900XT was $399 bucks. The HD7970 was $600.

Its said to see it price so high.

 

[xcerpt]

I gave up on AMD when I tried to add another HD5850 to my rig for CF for BF3
The game was unplayable. That's when I bought a gtx 680 . Now I just dropped another Gtx 680 in it for sli and what do you know it runs BF4 beta at ultra settings without a hiccup. AMD drivers do suck I seen it. Especially for CF!

 

[hapkido]

I gave up on AMD when I tried to add another HD5850 to my rig for CF for BF3
The game was unplayable. That's when I bought a gtx 680 . Now I just dropped another Gtx 680 in it for sli and what do you know it runs BF4 beta at ultra settings without a hiccup. AMD drivers do suck I seen it. Especially for CF!

You probably didn't install the crossfire profiles. Or you tried to run ultra settings with a 1GB frame buffer (it's not enough for BF3). I've been playing BF3 with crossfire 5850s since release without issue.

 

[thesuperguy]

If I remember correctly, it is the R9 290 that is supposed to be on level with 780 performance. If you are basing your entire argument on the price of the 290x vs the 780, then where does the actual competitor of the 780 in terms of performance come in? You cannot base your argument on a titan level card vs a 780 when you could compare titan level with titan level and 780 level with 780 level, as it should be.

I'm comparing value, not straight performance. It doesn't matter if you have the fastest graphics card in the world, if it's exorbitantly expensive it'll be very poor value and should be ignored by everyone who isn't made of money.

The Titan is much worse value than the 780, which is much worse value than the 770. Comparing these new cards to the 780 in terms of value is giving them the benefit of the doubt. They really should deliver better value for this to be an interesting launch.

Now, there is no reliable data as to the performance they'll offer, and even the pricing is not exactly clear. So I'm not counting them out, just saying that with these apparently high prices, their performance had better be impressive if AMD wants them to be relevant.

Thing is, you can only expect crappy value for this high performance, niche end of the market. Why bash AMD if they ARE improving the value of these cards. Sure they are still overpriced, but not so much so in comparison to nvidias cards currently. These are not meant for your average consumer. They do not need to be relevant to sell.

 

[eldragon0]

Possibly good news everyone!! http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007709%20600100181%20600473898%204022&IsNodeId=1&name=%24750%20-%20%241000

shows all r9 270 and r9 280's as ALSO 750$+ Meaning that previous code that was parsed out most likely was just their default to separate the R7's from R9's.