Hardware MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G Review

That is one sexy card. Very nice. Very sexy.

Great read!

 

Where did you see a 1080 at £520?

 

I quite like the styling of MSI's latest cooler, it's not too over the top with the LEDs and like their previous offerings seems to do a decent job of cooling and remaining quiet.

That was the price of the 1080 at launch on a few sites, since the whole the EU referendum madness and the pound fluctuating a bit the card prices have jumped up approximately 12-15%.

 

I bought mine at launch and cheapest I could find it was £579. Think it was Scan.

 

I think that was around about the average price on most sites, one or two retailers were able to negotiate slightly better deals so had a selection around £540-590

OverClockers and CCL were the lowest I saw with the KFA2 (which got dubbed the Clown Card on the OCUK forums for it's terrible clown picture on it) which was originally priced on those two sites for £524.99 inc VAT.
All other brands/models were about £545 and above.

 

MSI have really upped the premium on the cooler this time round, wasn't too bad with the 9xx series but this gen are bloody expensive

 

I'm glad I bought my KFA2 1080 HOF when I did because its £130 more expensive than when I ordered it on the 10th June. I think its even jumped about £80 in price since last week! The prices being asked for these cards are insane

 

I'd say that's less to do with currency and more supply/demand. For example, we were told that partner cards would be $100 cheaper than refrence cards ut they seem to be either the same or slightly more.

There were 1 or 2 going at discount prices but 90% were £620 on release and checking now most still are,

 

I'm currently debating on the 1070 and 1080 version of this card, been planning on picking up a 34" screen for a while so it's a question of whether I go for a G-Sync one or do with the trusty Dell.
I had a go at testing the 1080 a while back as I was building a friend's machine and the performance difference to my 670 blew me away, but as I don't particularly need maximum fps I could probably get away with going for the 1070 and putting the saved cash into something else... possibly some liquid cooling parts.

Either card is totally overkill for the main game that I play (Europa Universalis) as that's a turn-based grand strategy with not a lot happening on the screen. Other than that I mostly play Mech Warrior Online these days and that seems to be more limited by the server latency than my system's graphics.

It's definitely a combination of the two, I don't retailers expected to sell so many that fast at launch prices so the stock was gone before anyone knew what to do... now they've got a bit of a backlog for orders on the aftermarket 1080 models.

Currency has at least a small part to play in the price hike as all retailers have to buy their stock in US Dollars and they often pay by monthly invoices, so with the value of the pound dropping by quite a chunk during the past month the retailers have had to pass on that increased cost to the customers... though I'm certain they're over compensating with the prices.
I wonder if the recent proposed changes to corporation tax would help to reduce costs again, if it ever got put into action.

Yeah, most of the retailers had a couple of cheaper ones around £585 and then the majority a bit over £600. OverClockers did quite well to get a nicer deal from the manufacturers so were able to offer 14 out of the original 21 aftermarket models under £600 at launch (at least 5 of those under £560).
Here's the original pre-order announcement with their prices
https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18732798

CCL managed to offer a good few at around £570/£580 for the first week, then all hell broke loose on their pricing and now the cheapest is £620 like you said.
I think Ebuyer and Scan probably made the right choice by starting off with the prices near that mark, so when the pound changed in value they didn't have to adjust as much.