When exactly will the Nvidia 260 / 280 prices be coming down ? Right now the BFG series for the above are £211 and £340 respectively. I thought Nvidia had publicly stated that they were reducing the prices of their 260/280 series to compete with the 4850 (£132) and 4870 (£180). Currently the 260 and 280 prices are not competitive at all ??? (prices above taken from overclockers.co.uk. Scan is pretty much the same too) and if you convert to $$$, then Holy RipOff Batman.. A 280 for a cool $680. Unbelievable.. when you can get an EVGA 280 for $449 (about £230) from newegg. UPDATE - JUST NOTICED AN ADD on overclockers.... ********************************************* LEADTEK cards now reduced ... 260 now £193 280 now £276 Getting there.... but where are BFG's price cuts ???? So Im not buying (yet another reason why the UK is going into recession...) We are all holding onto our money !
i saw BFG gtx280 OC1 on OCuk at £234 (B-grade sales) and after lunch, when i decided to go for it, it's GONE! damn it the preminum brands always takes longer to drop in prices..... just wait. or even skip this generation.
My aim is to pick up a 260 for less than £200 (ideally the same price as a 4870). Im hopeful after reading other people's reports that the card will OC to reasonable levels as well. Ive decided to avoid the 280 I think.. way too many threads about a duff batch of them in circulation that overheat to >105C and stutter/chug. These posts are on Anand and HardOCP, and contain quite a few people who have been robbed !!! (Sometimes after RMA'ing their cards multiple times). Hmmm... so am avoiding the 280 until they figure it out or wait until your chance of scoring a dud diminishes..
I have thought about the 4870.. but am concerned that they are running really hot, and are currently (until they get a driver revision) running at full power constantly even in Windows 2D (thus making them hotter). Great Cards in terms of performance, but I keep reading about the 260 being lower power, a lot less heat, over clockable, and in terms of performance.. comparable (or close). Only problem is price. Couple of threads about 4870 heat : http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1326376 http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1324960
toms hardware has a good article on pricing: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-geforce-gtx-amd,5887.html
Those 4870s are serious heat makers though. I recently built a computer for a friend with a 4870 and after as little as 10-20 seconds the bracket was almost too hot to touch (he should be alright since I got him an Antec 900 which sans a few niggles is a pretty great case.) I plan on upgrading my computer to a Spider system come the end of August so it should be interesting to see how the prices sit.
Tom knows his confectionery, he can pick you out a great cake, but you shouldn't trust him to even plug in your computer.
the whole thing about the 4870 utputting more heat than the 260 is knaff, they are the same it's the 4870's cooler that sux balls.
No, actually the Radeon does put out more heat in comparison. He means the 260 doesn't generate much heat in 2D mode, because of the idle-power reduction. The Radeon still uses the full power (and results in the heat output) even at idle. I'm sure that's what he intended to say. I went ahead and picked up an XFX vanilla 280 for $425 shipped and no MIR. I'm fine with it.
i got mine runnin in a lian-li A05B with nothing but an antec expansion fan on medium speed cooling it. It runs absolutely fine.
I don't think that is true. My 4870 is currently running at *opens catalyst control centre* 500mhz core. When I play a game it will go up to 820mhz (or at least I presume it is... havn't really checked!!). So my GPU temp is currently 57C; not too hot really.
yeah both the 4850 and the 4870 will reduce the clock settings when they aren't being used. the 4850 drops to 500mhz from... 625 or 650 I think.
