AMD slashes Radeon HD7990 price

In the wake of the Crossfire-saving Catalyst 13.8 beta drivers, AMD has begun to look at being more competitive with Nvidia now that they can compete not only with single-GPU performance, but multi-GPU as well.

In a bid to make Nvidia a little more fearful, AMD this morning (7 August 2013) announced that they were slashing the prices of Radeon HD7990 “Malta” dual-GPU graphics cards.

The company and its board partners have begun to drop prices of the card across multiple retailers in the US today. This pricing may extend to several other regions, but this has yet to be confirmed.

While price slashing of a top-of-the-range card isn’t unusual, its the amount that’s staggering – AMD has dropped the price from the usual retail price point of US $1100-$1200 to just $699 (approx. R6,930).

Prices on Newegg are hitting those lows right now and these cards also still have the Never Settle bundle with eight games attached.

SA pricing still high

	Wootware	Rebeltech	Ikonik	Titan-Ice	Sybaritic
ASUS GTX690 4GB	11,764	12,899	13,096	13,349	12,257
ASUS GTX Titan 6GB	14,104	14,016	14,364	15,349	14,938
Club3D HD7990 Malta 6GB		13,874		14,949
EVGA GTX690 4GB	14,415				15,701
EVGA GTX Titan 6GB	14525		14677.74		15,826
Gigabyte GTX690 4GB	12,747	12,308	13,314.46	13,449	13,406
Gigabyte GTX Titan 6GB	13,629	13,480	13,948.19	16,049	14,333
MSI GTX690 4GB			12,306
PowerColor HD7990 6GB	8999
PowerColor HD7990 Malta 6GB	10,995
Sapphire HD7990 Malta 6GB	13,071	13,286	13,382	13,649	13,916

While the Americans are enjoying the price drop, South Africans are still sitting with abnormally high prices for the Radeon HD7990. Average pricing is around R12,900, but depending on the retailer this could go up or down.

However, most HD7990 examples sold locally are under the price of the Geforce GTX Titan which averages just over R14,500, making it competitive against Nvidia’s strongest single-GPU graphics card. Against the GTX690 the HD7990 is still a little more expensive.

Dropping the price, even by R2,000, would make it a stellar buy, because with the frame rating drivers the HD7990 is appreciably faster than both its competitors. One retailer already has similar pricing, with Wootware dropping the price of the unofficial HD7990 that PowerColor made prior to the reference design being launched earlier this year.