Nice find Mr. Henningsen $130. There second cheapest 4870 cards are $155, which is still cheaper than newegg's where they have scyrocketed back up to $180 on newegg. zipzoomfly.com - I'll have to remember that site. I want you to know that I've greatly enjoyed many of your articles, by the way.
Take any of my suggestions, with a grain of salt, especially since you're a professional journalist and have alot more 1st-hand experience publicly making hardware reccomendations to the masses, and probably are considering some things I may fail to recognize. To me, Reccomending an almost disappeared product like 4800 series cards still seems dicey for people like you and me. It can offer a compelling value if you're lucky enough to still find one near its lowest still-in-production price. But, when that one fleeting deal disappears, the people you help might come back and bitch at you and me when they can't find it.
When I help a friend or family or customer build or upgrade a computer, I take in account, how many boards with a particular GPU/chipset are available (in-stock) near the price of the cheapest one I can find. If all or nearly all of the other offerings, I can find are far removed from the price I found, I personally feel uneasy making a blanket recommendation for that item.
To a large extent, the SBM articles also double as "Best Gaming System for the money" article somewhat. The components chosen for each system in each price category really do serve as implicit reccomendations (or at least suggestions). Projected Market availability is still important but not as crucial for monthly editorials like Don's Best Gaming CPU and GPU For the Money articles.If a product suddenly falls into complete absence or unexpectedly skyrockets $30 higher 2 weeks after the article is written, there will will be a reference available in only 2 weeks to reflect that change. In a quarterly article like SBM, projected market availability plays much larger role during that term's reccomenations. Since readers will likely refer to this article until about a month before the next System builder marathon article, it would seem that we would want to recommend products whose supplies that won't dry up in a couple of weeks. We both know the supply of 4800 cards are about to be extinct because of AMD's previous announcement of ending production in favor of 57xx and 58xxx cards and rapidly increasing prices over the past few weeks confirm there is indeed a rapid reduction in supply, which has been reflected in rapid increases in price from most supply sources. Thus, it is predictable that the price is expected to rapidly increase relative to alternative products on the market. Admittedly, your recommendation is a perfectly valid and acceptable one if you view the lifespan of SBM articles as having a lifespan on the order of a couple of weeks. It all depends on what kind of role and purpose you intend the SBM articles to fulfill. I am sure other readers don't quite see these articles as fulling the same role as I see them, and that's ok.
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