AMD Radeon HD 3870: the new midrange DX10 king?

[Scott B]

Maybe what you've observed, Drunkenmaster, is unique to ecommerce - where retailers can react to competitor's price changes very rapidly. Its odd the ocuk is always forst to raise the price and that the others follow suit. It's almost as if, rather than colluding with ocuk, the others are following it. That would be odd behaviour if it was the case. The answer seems to be to buy from Yoyotech or Komplett! If you're not sure about Yoyotech, they have a bricks and mortar store in Central London where you can actually see and touch the products before you buy them, just like in the good old days.

I agree with you about restricting the amount of money GPU vendors can spend on optimising/supporting/bribing developers. However that would presumably need legislation requiring developers to ensure a level playing field, which would be difficult to bring about, let alone enforce. It's a tough one, but it is a shame if developer relations trumps technology in determining graphics performance.

[kalniel]

but enthusiasts like to buy from enthusiast shops, especially when they are told its the only place they'll get one on launch.

I have yet to see an enthusiast blindly follow someone saying 'we're the only place to have it' - just as they aren't likely to blindly follow someone saying 'our card is the fastest by 100%'.

We may be willing to pay a premium, but we only do so knowing that we've researched and are getting the best.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

this is something thats basically too true, TWIMTBP is god damn everywhere. which is why i brought up the antitrust thing. if microsoft paid intel a couple billion so OSX would run terribly on intel chips, well that would be the software equivilent and everyone would be up in arms over it. or if intel paid MS to make microsoft run like crap on amd chips, again the same thing would happen. the reason i think it should stop completely, instead of ATi trying to compete with them is, if they both wanted to offer crysis team money, they'd end up basically putting in bids in an attempt to win the game for their company, which would increase the amount of money the companies put in, and would end up doing it for even more games. if nvidia/ati start dumping 10's of millions into games to make them run better on their hardware, the price will simply be passed on to us when we buy the cards.


could you please have someone write an editorial bashing the heck out of ocuk to highlight the fact that they raise prices, other stores raise them in turn and there seems to be a fairly serious "anti competition" agreement going on. because for instance, quite a few places had the 2900xt at £230 on release day, then ocuk put theirs up at £270, suddenly all the places with cheap cards repriced them in line, because why not make more profit, off us. then instead of prices easing up after stock became easier to get, they simply stayed the same for ages, when it was obvious they were all getting in cards that would sell at a profit at £230.

ocuk also do this very very standard forum announcement of "we're the best in the world and will be the only ones with stock in the uk, its limited stock so price is +20% of what we said the prices would be 2 weeks ago when we we naughty and broke the nda quietly by telling you the rrp". it happens for every single release. so many times their actual site will say something on the news page along the lines of "first stock in the uk" a specific incident i recall was the maxtor dm10+'s, i think dabs had them in for a week before OCUK got them in stock, claimed they were the first in the uk and charged £15 more than dabs. Said the same thing about x38 boards recently on their site, which seemed to change a few hours later when i mentioned in their annoucement thread that other places had the board £30 cheaper. They are currently charging £158 for the instock 3870, yoyo have it listed at £140, the rrp, and scan/tekheads and a bunch of other smaller companies all tend to now post up prices just after ocuk and within a couple pounds.

I agree with the price escalation as being very annoying. I usually wait until the prices drop though.

"lack of will power is certainly to blame for part of the uk's ripoff price culture".

I agree with this also. The "that is the way it is" attitude does not help anyone. The 8800gt cards would be 140-150 quid still if very few people decided to buy the 8800GT cards after the online retailers unceramoniously raised the prices by an extra 30-40 quid!

It seems for other electronics like digital cameras this prices escalation rarely happens and the RRP is adhered too even if stocks are low.
In those cases it is simply "first come first served".

[DeSean]

I'm wondering whether it would be a good idea to put a HD3870 in my x16 slot and a HD3850 in my x4 slot and run them in crossfire...

[drunkenmaster]

well , not to drag out the lack of competition on prices theory, but yoyotech has now gone and matched scan/ebuyers HIGHER price now.

i mean, i do seem to remember a time that companies would match the lowest price, or get as low as possible and compete for your custom. but now it seems all the sites that really specialise in getting the parts enthusiasts want seem to all raise prices and match higher prices which is just, so much the opposite of every other industry, and even most computer stores.

i mean, they don't have to get together and actually agree to do it but, when ocuk , who constantly claim to be the biggest shop in the uk, or at least biggest enthusiast store and then occasionally forget to say the enthusiast part now and then, increase prices. i mean, other stores have the option to do what they want, where logic dictacts they undercut to get more sales, they don't. they all just raise prices. its just dodgey.

[kalniel]

Doh.

[Scott B]

well , not to drag out the lack of competition on prices theory, but yoyotech has now gone and matched scan/ebuyers HIGHER price now.

i mean, i do seem to remember a time that companies would match the lowest price, or get as low as possible and compete for your custom. but now it seems all the sites that really specialise in getting the parts enthusiasts want seem to all raise prices and match higher prices which is just, so much the opposite of every other industry, and even most computer stores.

i mean, they don't have to get together and actually agree to do it but, when ocuk , who constantly claim to be the biggest shop in the uk, or at least biggest enthusiast store and then occasionally forget to say the enthusiast part now and then, increase prices. i mean, other stores have the option to do what they want, where logic dictacts they undercut to get more sales, they don't. they all just raise prices. its just dodgey.

I agree, if etailers are matching each other's price RISES then that's an almost unique situation and needs sorting out. Are there quite a small number of places that you can actually buy a new graphics card as soon as it comes out? If so then it seems that the GPU dudes are inadvertantly creating a cartel by launching with such limited numbers.

Having said that, it's normal for early adopters to have to pay a premium for their zeal, so I guess the more surprising thing is that these products are ever listed at the manufacturer's recommended selling price in the first place. Presumably prices start to plummet as soon as decent amounts of stock hit the market.

On that note, apparently AMD expects to ship 500,000 3800 units by the end of the year - 10 times more than Nvidia made available at the launch of the 8800GT. So it will be interesting to see what effect that greater availability has on price.

[drunkenmaster]

to a degree thats correct. but in 99% of business early zeal normally means paying full rrp, then after that competing for sales causes prices to drop below rrp. this has always been the case, and is the case on many many computing products. but for these enthusiast items we get some people sticking to RRP, but most increasing price, then when stock eases up we sometimes, but not always, get steading competing for the price to get back down to rrp. its very very odd, and very bad for us.

theres an rrp these companies sell at, ati and asus aren't selling them for higher prices at first, its possible the distributors companies are buying of them are raising the prices a little with lack of stock, but they don't do it on most other items with little stock. the rrp is design to make profit for ati, the manufacturer(ie/ asus), the distributor and the retailer. so the rrp should really never be exceeded. after release almost any item you buy, tv's, dvd players, cars, bikes, xbox's, speakers, i dunno, cd's, games, they all drop below rrp. graphics cards are almost the sole exception, they are also one of the easiest upgrades and almost always the single biggest performance boost for gaming you can buy so you'd expect enthusiast companies sell more gfx cards than anything else at all.