AMD Radeon R9 290X 8GB available for pre-order, but prices are high

Overclockers UK has started to sell and take pre-orders on AMD Radeon R9 290X graphics cards with 8GB of GDDR5 memory. The store offers various graphics cards from multiple suppliers. Unfortunately, prices of such graphics boards are considerably higher than expected just several days ago.

AMD Radeon R9 290X 8GB graphics cards are based on fully-fledged Hawaii-XT (2816 stream processors, 176 texture units, 64 raster operations pipelines, 512-bit memory bus and 1GHz default clock-rate) graphics processing units and come with slightly increased GPU (up to 1040MHz) and memory (up to 5.50GHz) frequencies.

At present Overclockers UK offers four Radeon R9 290X graphics cards with 8GB of memory:

• Sapphire Radeon R9 290X Vapor-X OC 8192MB GDDR5 – £379.99;
• Sapphire Radeon R9 290X 8192MB GDDR5 – £359.99;
• Powercolor Radeon R9 290X PCS+ OC 8192MB GDDR5 – £379.99;
• MSI Radeon R9 290X Gaming Edition 8192MB GDDR5 – £379.99;

The prices of 8GB versions of AMD’s Radeon R9 290X graphics cards seem to be rather high, keeping in mind that OcUK offers regular versions of the Radeon R9 290X graphics boards with 4GB of GDDR5 memory for £221.99 – £259.99.

Since AMD Radeon R9 290X 8GB graphics cards seem to be over-priced today, it is unclear how AMD plans to recapture market share from Nvidia using such boards. Perhaps, the launch of such solutions is meant to keep average selling prices of AMD Radeon R9 graphics cards on relatively high levels after the company and its partners had to start offering discounts on the Radeon R9 products in October. Still, it is unclear why AMD wants to launch a product that is not going to become really popular.

AMD did not comment on the news-story.

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KitGuru Says: Perhaps, AMD intentionally set high recommended prices on the Radeon R9 290X 8GB graphics cards in order to see the pricing of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 970/980 8GB solutions and then adjust its price-tags to stay competitive. In this case, it makes sense waiting before buying.

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