AMD's Radeon HD 4870 X2 - Testing the Multi-GPU Waters

NVIDIA Strikes Back: The GTX Gets a Dose of Reality

NVIDIA was still living in the days of G80 when it launched its 1.4 billion transistor GT200 GPU and the GeForce GTX 280/260 that were based on it. Not only did NVIDIA's own GeForce 9800 GX2 outperform the GTX 280 at a lower price, but once AMD launched its Radeon HD 4800 series it became very clear that NVIDIA's pricing was completely out of whack. NVIDIA was pricing its GPUs for a reality that just didn't exist.

The first step to get things back in line was to drop the price of the GeForce 9800 GTX, which NVIDIA did. Next up were the new GTX cards, the GTX 280 now sells for $450 and the GTX 260 is a $299 part. In the conclusion of our Radeon HD 4800 launch article we wrote:

"The fact of the matter is that by NVIDIA's standards, the 4870 should be priced at $400 and the 4850 should be around $250."

It looks like NVIDIA's standards changed, largely thanks to AMD, and now the key players in NVIDIA's lineup are priced more realistically. Today we'll take a look at how the landscape has been reshaped as a result of NVIDIA's pricecuts. At the same time, AMD's literally hot GPUs have seen their prices fall; the Radeon HD 4870 is now a $270 - $280 GPU, slightly down from $299 and the Radeon HD 4850 is a $170 - $180 card. These are very slight changes in price, but at least they are in the right direction.

AMD Prices the Radeon HD 4870 X2

When we previewed the Radeon HD 4870 X2 we weren't given a target pricepoint, we just knew that it'd be more than $500. Today we have a price: $549.

At $549 the X2 isn't exactly a bargain, it's slightly cheaper than two Radeon HD 4870s but you don't need a motherboard with two PCIe x16 slots to use it, which helps lower overall system costs. With NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 280 price drops, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is now the most expensive current GPU on the market - pretty impressive for a company that swore off building huge GPUs.

The competing product from NVIDIA is, well, there isn't exactly one. NVIDIA doesn't have a single-card multi-GPU GT200 product, so we have to rely on comparing the 4870 X2 to the GeForce GTX 280 (priced at $450) as well as the GeForce GTX 260 in SLI (priced at $300 x 2).