How bad are we Canadians gonna eat it? (USDvsCND)

Like a lot of you I am waiting eagerly for the 4870 to hit the shelves.

While I was looking I saw the prices for the 4850's and I noticed a pretty decent price premium on the cards from canadian retailers. This really pisses me off considering our dollar is pretty much equal to the USD...
I have no interest in helping some greedy company pad its pockets with my money because our dollar is doing well...

I dunno what canadian retailers you went to, the ones in Toronto follow US prices.

Where are you looking at prices? MemoryExpress (www.memoryexpress.com, based out of Calgary, AB) has 3 4850 cards for $199.99. Newegg has 8 4850's; one is $194.99, the others are all $199.99.

I haven't done in-depth comparison, so I'm just wondering where you're seeing a "pretty decent price premium" on them.

Clint

Here 's a HD 4850 for $175:
http://www.ncix.com/products/index [...] re=Diamond

It also saves you another $16 if you combine it with a P5Q Pro.

Not anymore, they are pretty much on par. (slightly lower now)

No worries... Maybe they were high to begin with, and then dropped to more reasonable amounts later.

BTW, the 4870's are listed on NewEgg already, for around the $300 mark.

Clint

Don't know if they do, but it may give us an idea of what (and when) to look for them here.

None of those statements make sense.
ATi was profitable while it was still Canadian.
Also the prices are before taxes, the Mfr tax was removed and replaced by the GST.
It's because of the Liberals debt reduction policy that improved the economic situation and that was after the deficit spending of both the Liberal (Trudeau) and PC (Mulroney / Campbell) governments. Thankfully Harper hasn't messed with that (other than keeping the dollar artificially low for the Easterners), because really Red or Blue they both do less to help than mess-up usually.

Now that's something I easily agree with. NCIX isn't always the best prices, but they usually are GOOD, and having a Can/US branch of each usually means they're on top of exchange rate changes.

I was in fact thinking of Trudeau when I wrote that. I read somewhere that about a third of our income tax goes to pay interest on the debt, and that's when we got the debt in the first place. Also, a higher income tax will push prices up, trust me. If the government takes more of your employees' income, you have to pay them more so they can still pay their rent, so you charge the customers more, etc. OK, never mind, my bad, I really shouldn't talk politics on a tech forum.

Not to make this a Canadian politics/history lesson, but it does relate obtusely to the OP's question so just two quick points.

Yes Trudeau created a big debt, however it was mainly during the economic down times, Mulroney on the other hand increased (not reduced) that deficit and debt during economic good times, so really, is either side really innocent?

Why would I trust you on that? Do you have any economist that backs that?
Prices and income taxes are not directly related, they are related through other mechanicsms, and it would depend greatly on what other expenses you had, such as health care, secuirty, etc. and then also the competition for resources by those who get moneies from the gov't. However high income taxes on their own don't influence prices anymore than low income taxes alone affect prices.
Mfr taxes, duties, and other such taxes would have a far greater influence on prices than income tax alone. Even related to the cost of labour in the country it would depend on other factors, like the cost of them paying for services themselves, and as inflation hasn't changed much so emplyee wages wouldn't be greatly affected, and their affect on price changes would be lowered. As the HD4850 is made in China, I doubt it would represent a large factor of production, and even still only a minor part of the distributions/sales equation when spread out over the volume of parts involved. Disposable incomes would play a role, but as wages haven't increased much and taxes haven't changed much, I doubt that'd change much for the local market and that's reflected by the fairly low inflation rate.

Anywhoo, while it's a tech forum it does relate to the OP's question about prices, but as someone who's speciality is Economics, I don't necessarily agree with your precept.

LOL. Check this out.
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] ,1740.html
Germany does pretty good, actually, according to that article.

They're all without sales tax though, trust me you feel violated up the arse after that 19% "Mehrwertsteuer" gets tacked on

Sorry to hear that. Hopefully it will get better. Where I live it used to be 15% until 2006 or so, but now it's 13%.