Radeon R9 290X hit's $900! Time to switch to nVidia?

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7758/radeon-r9-290x-retail-prices-hit-900

That’s right folks the litecoin mining craze has caused the price of the R9 290X to hit $900 on newegg.

I find this totally unacceptable. I have been looking for a R9 290 in the $400 price range and ever since later November that prices are have skyrocketed. It’s been FREAKING 2 ½ month’s and the Radeon R9 290 is now going for $600 that's $200 more than the price it launched for. That is totally unacceptable. I have switched to AMD in 2008 after 10 years of using nVidia (was even a nVidia fan boy back then). But after 5 years of AMD I am willing to switch back. I find it unacceptable that AMD is not flooding the market with R9 290/290X so prices can go down. I am glad is AMD is making money but that shouldn’t be at the expense of PC Gamers. I don’t even know if AMD is making the extra cash or the retailers are simply price gouging and making huge profits, which doesn’t benefit AMD at all other then having their GPUs sell out. Why isn’t AMD flooding TSMC and filling up all the wafers for 290/290X GPU’s?

It’s funny that IDIOTS on this board tell me I am a AMD fanboy but they forget the one rule and that is MONEY TALKS. The only people who would buy stuff at extra dollars are the truly DELUSIONAL fanboys. There’s no way I am paying $600 to buy a GPU that should be priced at $400. That was the main reason for me switching to AMD was that they provided excellent performance for the price and also the “bump gate” incident of nVidia which pissed me off as I lost my 17” gaming laptop. But I am willing to switch.

Since I buy the high end rage of GPU’s (the 4870 the high end of the 48XX series, HD 6950 bios flashed to HD 6970 which is the high end of the HD 69XX) series I am looking towards the high end of the GTX 7XX series mainly the GTX 770.

So, is that good buy? Is there any other GPU from nVidia that reaches the performance of GTX 770 with lesser price?

Enlighten me.

I'd say yes. I used to only buy AMD cards, but I just now bought a GTX 760. I'm guessing I'll get about a year or so out of it before I have to upgrade, but by then cards should have come down a bit off this fad and for the time being it should be able to play most games on Ultra/High.

I am in the market for a new GPU and I know I will pass on this...lol

GTX 770 is a good value if where talking US prices

Asus 770 is currently $320 and the gigabyte model is usually $330ish (free game for both)

If you want great overclocking potential (or 4GB Vram) then the classified 4GB version goes on sale for $380 a couple times a month (it also comes with a free game). Most people are hitting 1300mhz which is fast.

AMD did drop the ball big time (stock issues even before mining boom and forcing stock coolers down are throats equals no business from me).

Best bang for your buck was what AMD always had - can't claim that anymore. MIght as well get the better card - for lower.

Bad for consumers though, because we're not getting competitive prices.

its time.

The fact it took these insane prices to force you to even consider buying Nvidia makes you a fanboy. Any sensible person would look at GPUs from both companies to begin with when shopping around.

was it EVER time to buy AMD? Nvidia makes better cards. yes they are more expensive, but they also perform better, have better driver support, SLI works better, Physx is awesome in the games that support it....

the R9 cards being 30-40% more expensive just makes it even easier to stay with nvidia.

It's always time to buy Nvidia cards.

Go for the GTX 770. I have one myself and can run everything smoothly. Good bang for buck, IMO.

Gosh I just love my R9 290 that I spent 395$ on and OMG free BF4 too? Aw AMD is too kind.

That's what everyone gets for complaining about the reference cooler :D

You get free games with Nvidia GPUs as well! I got BF4 with one of my GTX 760s and I got AC Black Flag, Splinter Cell Blacklist & Arkham Origins with my second GTX 760.

**** if I had bought an amd card and ebay'd it, I would had still came out positive with a nv counterpart.

Is it still a shortage on those cards?

@insane_metalist: Yes, but I got one with a 290, that I wanted and would have purchased regardless, making it even more worth while and the cost for the gpu (in essence) less.

@horgen123: I was at microcenter yesterday and overheard a guy who said he was going around to every physical store looking for them to use for bitcoin mining, so I assume others are doing this too and it will last for a while :\.

Ahh..the stupid old AMD fanboy argument. I did consider both options. Why would I not? Because I used nVidia before for 10 years in fact. The fact is the R9 290 was my target because at $400 it had the best price/performance, was only ~5% slower than the more expensive R9 290X/Titan. Was clearly the better deal.

The fact that you would think that I would pay $200+ more to get a GPU from a particular camp makes you look like an idiot. If I was a fanboy then I would pay the extra $200 and get AMD, it's that simple.

Well AMD was the best bang for the buck prior to the litecoin mining. With respect to Physx what would be the performance hinderence if I were to enable Physx would I still be able to push 1080P/60 with a GTX 770?

yeah man, im also in that position ur in forced to buy a shtty nvidia card. Ah well

wat? The 780ti eats pretty much any AMD card's lunch. Then there's the additional software features you get in various games, as well as SGSSAA support. Nvidia has always been able to price their cards high because they're NOT crap.

And for anyone obsessed with image quality, nvidia is the only way to go. AMD still has terrible downsampling support.

Don't feed him.

Radeon R9 290x is listed as sold out on Newegg.com at a cost of $700. It looks like the folks at Newegg is trying to cash in on the demand for these cards.

The R9 280x is priced at $490 if someone still want adequate performance playing Titanfall at high quality graphics.

Luckily for you, after the 200 series was released, the GTX 770 was NEVER a bad value.

It was like $330 (so like $10-20 more than the 280x) for a slightly faster card with $50-100 in free games versus no free games....... (not to shabby). Even the 4GB model at the time was only like $50 more than the 280x (so once again, not shabby)

Most people who buy a third party version are guaranteed within 5% of a stock 780/R9 290 (not shabby for a card that often goes on sale for $300 or less).

I recommend only Nvidia right now for people builds.

Have to feed the AMD troll because they know AMD products aren't at Intel's or Nvidia's standards and have peddle their chips

Got mine at regular price, been thinking about selling it hahaha.

ncix.com has some for less then 900 bucks

heres one for $659

http://products.ncix.com/detail/asus-radeon-r9-290x-directcu-74-93996-1382.htm

not sure why people go to newegg, that place is awful and overprices almost everything.

its still not 400 bucks like u said it was a while ago... which i find very dishonest they would put the price up so high like this... best u can do is just wait and get a next gen card.

I still use a 680gtx, i paid a little over 400 when i bought it, but the 500 dollar range is totally the max i'd ever pay for a card. I think my card has a good year left in it at least

I agree. I normally alternate between AMD and Nvidia with each new purchase. I'm suppose to go with AMD because my current card is still my 2011 GTX 560 Ti. But, with the current mess, I'm likely to break that rule and go with Nvidia again, either a GTX 760 or GTX 770.

HD 7870ghz edition FTW at $159

So I was waiting for the 280x to come back in stock, but after 3 months running on my backup 5450 I'm getting a little annoyed at not being able to play a large portion of my games.

Should I go with the GTX770, or wait? The reason I was waiting for the 280x is because I run an eyefinity setup (5040x1050). So I wanted the 3gb of the 280x along with the higher memory bandwidth. Will the 2gb and 256 bit bandwidth of the 770 be much detriment (if any)?

Any thoughts? The $150 I made on my 7950 really wasn't worth it at this point....

Buy a 4GB GTX 770 and you're good! It's a bit faster then R9 280X (around 5% or so).

The best part of it all though, is that the people that bought it originally have already made back what the card costs and then some (I have and I am casually mining).

you made profit even factoring in the costs of hydro? your pc is probably use 300-400 watts when its gpu is maxed out. My power costs have gone up to extremes, just last month it was over 2000 dollars for hydro, which was made worse from the cold temps. Theres no way i could ever make enough to cover power costs on top of the costs of hardware

4GB is useful for SLI with that card, not so much if you don't.

Ya prices are crap. I decided to hold off upgrading my videocard till the fall when I'll just build a new system.

In the meantime I bought a ps4 to play around with.

Well I fortunantely do not have to pay for electricity, but even if I believe the going rate is around 10 cents a kilowatt hour which isn't a problem making 8-10$ a day (depends on how much I am using my computer and how long I have the mining software off). I have had my gpu since I believe early December so it is definitely possible to make that kind of profit. There wouldn't be a demand for these cards if they couldn't pay themselves off with ease.

meh, over priced garbage, nvidias best cards are over priced. Could AMD make a card worth $10000 that is 5 times more powerful than the 780ti? Yeah they could, but obviously no one will buy it. I could care less about the software features, honestly I cant tell the diff with physx on and off, and ive never even heard of sgssaa. Not to mention, AMD also has mantle, eyefinity and tressfx, also msaa whatever that is.

All I needed to see to stop taking you seriously :P

AMD is overpriced garbage right now, the only reason AMD initially start prices lower then Nvidia is because theirs dont flat out beat Nvidia's offerings and have to compete. when AMD is on top their prices are high also. Mantle is just smoke up your butt when you have an intel cpu, Nvidia has surround aka eyefinity, Your just another dumb fanboy and everyone knows it.

Wow you are both wrong and sound similar, so anyone calling someone a dumb fanboy is funny at best.

AMD and Nvidia have been trading blows for some time, AMD typically offered better performance per watt as well.(I love what Haswell is doing though!) I'll give Nvidia the driver win, but they have had they're own faults. I wouldn't call Mantle smoke, the performance gains are real and if you are a PC gamer... you should be rooting for it. This is the first time since 3dfx's Glide that a true gaming API has tried to surface.

It's drawing straws, it's not like the CPU race....you are going to get solid performance from either camp. I typically game with Nvidia. My last card was a 460 GTX 1GB, but I found a 7870Ghz for $160 back in November at Microcenter. There wasn't another card at that price that was going to compete(Most were still retailing for at least $200), so I picked up it and haven't been disappointed.

If you are going eyefinity than the memory bandwidth would have a limiting factor. My buddy brought a (I believe a GTX 680) to play in nVidia surround and got lag. Then the switched to AMD and it got better performance as you mentioned due to the higher memory bandwidth. While at lower resolutions it may not matter but at 5040X1050 it definitely will. I would wait for a 280X.

Shop BLT seems to have the most reasonable price. Not the price gouging newegg.

http://www.shopblt.com/item/gigabyte-gv-r928xoc-3gd-rev2-radeon-r9-280x-pcie/gigmbd_gvr928xoc3gdrev2.html

if you didnt know i was baiting the troll trap, blaz is a well known AMD fanboy

meh, you are also a well known nvidia fanboy, one among many in this thread. When nvidia can offer something with similar hardware specs at a similar price as a radeon, then i will be impressed. But right now theyre cards are over priced, over hyped, garbage. YES AMD cards are expensive right now, but that is mainly because of the damn miners.

AMD R9 290(X) cards should have arrived earlier with 3rd party cooling, that would nVidia rethink their pricing on some cards perhaps. But no custom card arrived until a month or two later, and now because of the mining AMD cards are as overpriced as nVidia's cards.

Also the 290(x) cards should have performed better. nVidia is currently leading the battle in my eyes.

I had both a HD 7950 and HD 6850 in the past and they were both great cards, and I planned to get a R9 290 or 280X but the price hike made them both $100 more at the time (probably even worse now). So I am a happy owner of an Asus GTX 760 that I got for $195, until I have a 1440p monitor and Maxwell comes out. As long as these prices are high I dont see AMD competing in the gaming market.

If it's such garbage then how come you're using an Nvidia card..? I don't care if you got it for cheap or not, it's garbage, remember? So don't use it. "forced to buy shitty Nvidia card" ? No one has a gun to your head.

O yes Im such a big fanboy that I recommend AMD cards to people and even when I upgrade I look at AMD offerings as well, I dont recommend AMD much as of late because of prices. And your an blind narrow minded fool if you think that Nvidia does not have comparable cards for the price.... Nvidia has many models that has similar performance with similar prices as AMD models that compete with Nvidia's models. you like to forget the fact that Nvidia;s GTX 670 matched if not surpassed at times the AMD's 7970 back in 2012 for less money. Back then 7970's were $550+, and when Nvidia released the 680 and 670 they were $500 and $400. AMD dropped prices of their 7970 and 7950 a few weeks after Nvidia's release. AMD dropped prices 7970 from 550 to $479 and $450 to $400 with 7950. and then again some more months later along with releasing new revised cards aka overclocking them to compete.

AMD had to increase the clockrates releasing a new 7970 and 7950 boost to be comparable to Nvidia's 680 and 670. Their new 7970ghz and 7950 boost were $500 and $400 while the older 7970 and 7950 dropped to $430 and $350. Even after the major driver overhaul AMD did in late 2012 that helped alot. the 7970ghz still only matched or inched ahead from the GTX 680. Then AMD did more price drops in 2013 and Nvidia released the titan(mainly a workstation card with gaming capabilities) and 700 series. And Nvidia was top again and AMD released their 290 series and Nvidia dropped their 780 and 770 prices to compete with 280x and 290 series. Also point out that AMD is not the best company because they play the same tune as Nvidia when they are up or when their down. The 260, 270 and 280 are just rehashed 7000 series that they increased prices because they were branded a new series.

It's a good thing I bought my r9 270 for $199 before the prices went up lol

man , you're the biggest hypocrit/fanboy in denial ive met on these boards. I was thinking of ignoring you but for old times sake, what the hell.

You say that you recommend AMD cards, but that is BS, i seen you do it once or maybe twice, majority of the time with you recommending nvidia cards. Nvidia gimps on hardware features, we both know that. They don;t have a single card with 3gb of vram for any price under $500, whereas AMD was selling the 7950 with 3gb of vram at one point for sub $180 (days long past I know). Also you keep comparing the 670 with the 7970 when everybody god damn knows the 7970 was underclocked like a beetch from the start. Hell, go check the benchmark thread, my 7970 was able to OC 500mhz from core clock, and +800mhz mem clock. If you downclock a 7970 low enough, even a geforce 7600 from 6 years ago can compete with it on even grounds.

Bottom line, AMD didn't need to overclock their cards to compete, that was just a marketting tactic, any body with half a brain knew what these cards were capable of and bought the pure vanilla stock cards

Your second paragraph you mention the history of the cards, yeah I know it well so what?? Of course AMD dropped the price to compete, any company will do that including nvidia, its only natural. If the titan and the 780 weren't raped so hard by the 290/290x then nvidia wouldn't have even released the 780ti the following week. Now that was a low class dirty move by nvidia, and even you have to admit it, releasing the 780ti just one week after the 290x destroyed them. Nvidia screwed over their own customers hard with that move, all the people who bought titans had to watch nvidia release the 780ti that is a class above and $300 cheaper lol. Well, nvidia customers are used to giving nvidia bj's and bending over and taking it up the anus. What can you say, they enjoy it.

Your living in a dream world of denial. You claimed I never recommend AMD cards but yet you call it BS and still admit that you seen me from your point of view recommend at least few AMD cards..... denial much? You think Nvidia gimps gpu's? You dont even understand why AMD went with 3gb vs 2gb , its all about the bit of the bus and what ratio of dram chips tends to work better. Claiming 7970 was downclocked from the start is such BS because some people were able to overclock their normal 7970's which in your mind thinks that all 7970 can do the same.... Fact is that it took a slight revision of increasing the clockrates and a new driver to actually put the 7970ghz at or slightly above GTX680.

OMG seriously are you in that much state of denial to think that AMD did all of the ghz revisions and the need of a new driver set that didnt suck was all marketing? HAHAHA thats a new low. Guess that's why the 7970ghz series in general have higher failure rates because they can take it!

Again you think Nvidia purposely released the 780ti a week after the 290x? maybe to a degree to rain on AMD's parade but the time frame for the 780ti was inline for 290 release , guess you ignored or forgot back in April 2013 that the Titan LE and Ultra plans were leaked suggesting to a 2013 summer release for a budget Titan aka GTX 780, and a more vague late 2013 or early 2014 release for the Ultra aka 780ti.

Glad I got mine at a regular price :P Love this card! That is completely insane though. This bitcoin mining craze is getting out of control.