How cheap will the 3870 get?

I have seen Best Buy selling a visiontek 3870 for $129. NewEgg and Tigerdirect both have them around $150. The same cards were $229 3 months ago.

I have one now, but i was wondering, how cheap does everyone think they will get with the 48xx and GTX2xx coming out this summer.

I know a lot of you will say, wait and get one of the new better cards. I don't want to spend $250 on a 4870 or GTX260 when i have a 1 month old 3870. I will wait until early '09 to get a 4870 or GTX. Then the price will be corrected after the first 6 month price bump from low supply. Just humor me.

At what price would it be worth throwing a second 3870 in xfire?

They won't get much cheaper any more. I think they will discontinue them first. Once they get to a point that they are no longer profitable they will stop making them and resellers might sell them cheaper to get rid of stock. OR sell them at a hight brick because of demand for a discontinued card.

$129 would be a good price to do Xfire. I'd do it now so you can enjoy it.

^ if the 4850 is $200 you may want to sell the 3870 and get a 4850. I'd weigh the option

so far this is what i am thinking. The 48xx should be out soon, i can wait a few more weeks. I may miss the sell at best buy, but there will be other sells. I wont buy a 48xx when it comes out, but it will give me an idea of prices so i can make a more informed choice.

Late summer, i think we will see a fire sell to get rid of the 38xx stock.

I just purchased the $129 Visiontek 3870 OC card from Best Buy. I'm going to add it to my 3870x2....

FYI for anyone interested: The Visiontek card comes with the ZEROTherm heat pipe cooler (815 I think) and not the reference cooler shown in the ad.

What really counts is how happy you are with your performance. All the what ifs? shoulda woulda couldas in the world don't make up for being happy with results. Good deal !

This is my first real gaming rig. So i am tinkering with it, the e7200 oc, crossfire, etc. So i am just playing a little. But yes i am thoroughly enjoying it. I have never been able to play a resolution over 1024x768 and usually had to play with AA off. IT is nice to see the eye candy and still have a playable framerate.

I hope i dont sound like i am bragging. I just wanted to spread the joy. LOL.

My machine is still a sub $1000 rig. There are a lot of machines that are much more powerful.

^Yep, good for you. Try Assassin's Creed if you have SP2 for Vista.

Sorry, typo, i mean SP1

I just bought this card from Best Buy last Tuesday for $129 to replace my 18 month old 7600GT. However, I am not getting the performance I'd like to see. I did a 3dMark06 and only registered a 3985 which seems way too low (edited see below).

I have an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ processor (200 Mhz) and 4GB RAM (800Mhz) on a decent MSI motherboard. There is an obvious performance jump from my old video card but I think something in my system is holding me back.

My gut reaction in comparison to the expected performance of card like this, my performance in normal games should probably be higher as well (for the sake of comparing it to Futuremark stand-alone).

Has anyone any ideas on what this could be?

Can the (below) average processor really drop the overall performance of a moderate system?

I've spent over $200 on the memory and video card upgrades and can drop another $100 on a processor if it is a hardware matter, but I wonder if it is a software issue?

Edit: I didn't know this, but my multiplier on CPU at default was at x5 vs. x10; therefore all 3dMark results nearly double with the exception of the 3rd graphic application which was a 1.5x increase.

New 3D Mark Score: 7649. Therefore, if I changed the BIOS to x10 to double my processor capacity and everything doubled in the 3D Mark 06, it appears that I would be running at full capacity and my 3800+ @10x may be bottlenecking the system.

If I go to the AMD Black 5000+, will that yield an approximate 5000/3800 = 32%?