Nvidia drops GeForce GTX 260 216 prices
Nvidia has dropped the price on its GeForce GTX 260 216-based parts - the first of these price drops has made it into the channel.
Novatech is listing Zotac's stock-clocked GeForce GTX 260 216 part at just over £210 including VAT. Before today, the GeForce GTX 260 216 cards have started at around £230 (inc. VAT) which meant that Nvidia has struggled to compete with AMD's ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB as it has been aggressively priced against the competition from Nvidia's two GeForce GTX 260 variants.
As I'm sure you know, there are two versions of the GeForce GTX 260 – one with 192 stream processors, and a newer variant with 216 shaders – and it's the latter that's supposed to compete with the 4870 1GB.
In addition to the price drop, the release of the Forceware 180 series drivers, which deliver some fairly nice performance improvements, it looks like the GeForce GTX 260 216 could be an attractive option moving forwards.
Not only does it match the Radeon HD 4870 1GB's performance characteristics—the two trade blows across a range of the latest games—but it's also now matching it on price. It means that things like better Folding@Home performance and PhysX support are now worth taking into account for a wider recommendation.
We're in the process of building our new X58-based graphics card test systems and one of the first things we're planning to do is to have another look at graphics card performance across the board.
Our only concern about the price drop relates to the margins that Nvidia is likely to get from this product – after all, the GT200 chip is not cheap to manufacture compared to RV770 because of its sheer size, but I'm sure it's something Nvidia has taken into account. This could be a matter of the company clearing stock ahead of the transition to 55nm, which it has been talking about since its second quarter earnings call.
Got a thought on the price drop? Let us know in the forums.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyGood for us though. I know it's unlikely but I hope AMD responds with a new price cut in the next weeks.
Novatech had a BFG GTX280 OC Maxcore for £204 not long ago.
Also a clocked normaly GTX260 can more than hold its own against the HD4870 so I never saw the big deal with the 216sp variant.
While I'm not particularly interested in a GTX260, lower prices are always a good thing!
i bought my gtx260+ OC2 maxcore for £220 on ebuyer more than a month ago. now OC1 is selling £250 on ebuyer and OCuk..........
nVidia need to push out their 55nm soon, or with current credit crunch, the price drop doesn't really mean much, and won't push stocks at all.
It's available in the channel, but it's EOL at Nvidia+partners
The thing is, I havent suddenly had some kind of ££ pay rise, so the number of £'s in my pocket hasnt changed. So they still feel expensive to me.
I consider the 260 to be the mid to high range and at about £220-240... its expensive. The 280 is astronomically priced out of my range (still) and even the 4870 is still too high in its 1GB form.
Wake me up when any of these cards hit a reasonable £175.
Look in to the oc'd 4850's with non reference cooler and 1 GB Ram, they would fit in that budget.