T8RR8R :
ATI might just be going for volume of sales to make a profit instead of the wallet raping method like Nvidia.
Yeah, but starting at $229 instead of a figure like $299 doesn't give you much to move price wise over the product lifecycle, so it would be best even from a marketing perspective to launch @ $299, and even within weeks cut to $249 and then you maximize profit from the 'must have' early adopters, and then give the hangers one that 'price drop' to get them to loosen their wallets.
Launch at $229, and then what? $30 price drop? OOOhhh AAAhh suddenly I'm weak in the knees got buy because they dropped it less than the price of a game.
If we're talking about MSRP then $229 is ridiculous, if we're talking about "found in e-tail shortly after launch" then it makes alot of sense.
Not profit maximizing, and if the performance figures are even just 25/50% boost over HD3870, the $229 figure is extremely low. And IMO the only reason to do that would be insanely good yields and the determination to explode market share by detroying the value of all other products including their own, which still makes no sense to me.
$229 for something will all the new features, performance at a GF8800GTS level, and lower power consumption, who wouldn't buy that, and how wouldn't you have a shortage?
I don't care if the GT200 is 50% faster ontop of the HD4870, if it's around twice the price, then there'd be value issue for most, especially since the sweet spot is not the $350-450 card, but the $175-250 "performance' range according to Peddie research.
If they can make a ton of the cards, they'll make a mint, but if they have even a slight shortage, then it's an indication that the MSRP sould've been higher at launch. And really right now is notthe time to try and get people to pay a significant premium for 1GB over 512MB of memory so much as make a a slightly slower core& memory GDDR3 512MB cost $229 and a faster GDDR5 512MB-1GB cost $299, that makes more sense. Launching an XT for $229 compresses all your other models price around and especially below it. And where do you now price your old HD3Ks? At $100/75/50 for the 3800/3600/3400?
Just doesn't make sense to me at all... except like I said, you have awesome yields/cost and you can dump a shedload of them on the market.