AMD Cuts Radeon R9 280 to $249
by Ryan Smith on May 13, 2014 7:10 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Radeon 200
AMD sends word this afternoon that they’re instituting an official price cut for one of their more recently launched video cards, the Radeon R9 280. The 280, AMD’s lower tier Tahiti part and Radeon HD 7950 analogue, was launched back in March, shortly before Cryptocoin Mania subsided and AMD video cards came back to their MSRPs. As a result of being launched in that time period, the 280 launched at an inflated MSRP of $279, suitable for a time when the higher tier 280X was well over MSRP but uncomfortably close now that AMD’s faster card is back at $299 where it belongs.
Consequently AMD is cutting the price of the 280 to bring its price back in line with its performance relative to AMD’s other video cards. Effective today the 280 is getting a $30 price drop, from $279 to $249. This puts it almost precisely between the 280X ($299) and 270X ($199) in AMD’s product stack. Meanwhile a $249 MSRP also means the card is now more directly competing with NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 760, which has a similar $249 MSRP, though can often be found for $10-$20 less. As one would expect, that is a very close matchup and it’s no mistake these cards are priced so close together now that AMD has better control of their retail pricing.
Wrapping things up, AMD tells us that they expect it will take a few days for the price cuts to filter through various partners and retailers, though a quick Newegg check is already turning up two cards priced at $249 or below. In fact Sapphire’s R9 280 Dual-X is already well below AMD’s new MSRP, with Newegg running what’s undoubtedly going to be a short-lived deal that sees the card priced at $219 after mail-in rebate, with Newegg taking off a further $20 for signing up for their newsletter to bring the final price down to $199. Meanwhile despite the price cut the 280’s status in AMD’s Never Settle Forever program remains unchanged, so the 280 is still a gold tier card that qualifies for 3 games through that program.
| Spring 2014 GPU Pricing Comparison | |||||
| AMD | Price | NVIDIA | |||
| $500 | GeForce GTX 780 | ||||
| Radeon R9 290 | $400 | ||||
| $320 | GeForce GTX 770 | ||||
| Radeon R9 280X | $300 | ||||
| Radeon R9 280 | $250 | GeForce GTX 760 | |||
| Radeon R9 270X | $200 | ||||
| Radeon R9 270 | $180 | GeForce GTX 660 | |||
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just4U - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
People should be very cautious about buying any of amd's 7850 on thru 290x video cards used... coin mining likely means many are out in the wild rdy to sell but considering how hard they were used they'd likely be iffy at best.RussianSensation - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
What usually fails on videocards is the fan. I've been running overclocked CPUs and GPUs for distributed computing projects since Athlon XP1600+ days. I've overvolted every Intel, AMD, NV GPU and CPU since 2003 and have never had any of them fail despite them running 24/7 for 2-3 years at a time before replacing them. With sufficient cooling and overvolting of less than 10%, ASICs do not wear out to any extent that matters. These products are meant to last 10+ years 24/7, easily. I still have a Core 2 Duo E6600 that runs at 3.4ghz from 2006 and it has been crunshing non-stop (minus power outages).Flunk - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
I've Bitcoin and then Litecoin mined for the last 2 years. If you keep pushing the cards to 100%, the VRMs eventually blow, it's not a matter of if but when. So I would be careful buying used AMD cards.Flunk - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
To make this clear, I've sold off my GPUs but I clearly marked them as being used mining cards. Most of the people who bought them were also miners.yuhong - Friday, May 16, 2014 - link
If you are wondering why, look up for example Vertcoin, which cannot be mined by ASICs (at least yet).alacard - Tuesday, May 13, 2014 - link
Meet the new card, same as the old card.purerice - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
Neither the new card nor the old card are the one card to satisfy the alacard.alacard - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
that's awesome hahaMondozai - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
"Meet the new card, same as the old card."The article is about price cuts, nothing else. Talk about missing the point, alacard.
Krysto - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
Is it because this specific card isn't popular with miners? Because those that are seem crazy expensive. You'd think the more popular something is, the less it could cost, because of economies of scale. AMD seems to take the opposite approach.