Another round of Radeon R9 290 price-drops may be incoming

At least two online stores in North America recently started to sell AMD Radeon R9 290 and AMD Radeon R 290X graphics cards at or below $300, a price-point that is unprecedented for high-end graphics adapters. While the deals seem to be limited by time, it is possible that AMD and its partners may be preparing another round of price-cuts in a bid to better rival Nvidia Corp.

Although both AMD and Nvidia fight for the market share globally, the most intense battle happens in the U.S. market. All the planned price-cuts are first made in the U.S. and only then become available for customers in other markets. As a result, it is tremendously important what AMD, Nvidia and their add-in-card as well as retail partners offer in the U.S. since this may indicate upcoming actions in the U.K. and Europe.

U.S.-based Newegg currently offers PowerColor AXR9 290X 4G graphics card for $299 after $30 mail-in rebate. The same store also sells MSI Radeon R9 290X Gaming 4GB for $319 after $30 mail-in rebate as well as Gigabyte GV-R929XOC-4GD for $329.

Another U.S. store, TigerDirect, offers PowerColor TurboDuo Radeon R9 290 4GB for $259.99 after rebate, which looks to be a very good offering. The most affordable Radeon R9 290-based graphics cards available at Newegg are XFX Double Dissipation R9-290A-EDFD 4GB as well as HIS iPower IceQ X² OC that cost $269. In fact, there are loads of Radeon R9 290 graphics cards that cost below $300 now.

AMD’s Radeon R9 290X 4GB is AMD’s flagship single-chip graphics card that is based on the fully-fledged Hawaii XT graphics processing unit with 2816 stream processors, 176 texture units 64 raster operating pipelines as well as 512-bit memory bus. The Radeon R9 290 4GB graphics board is powered by Tahiti Pro GPU with 2560 SPs, 160 TUs, 64 ROPs and 512-bit memory interface. At present AMD and its partners are rolling-out Radeon R9 290-series graphics adapters with 8GB of GDDR5 memory onboard.

AMD and its partners started to adjust prices of the Radeon R9 graphics cards in late September, after Nvidia Corp. revealed its massively successful GeForce GTX 970 and GeForce GTX 980 graphics adapters. AMD itself denies that it is behind Radeon R9 price-cuts and claims that its partners are running promo campaigns.

While potential price-cuts yet have to reach the U.K. market “officially”, Overclockers UK already has a number of good offerings for those, who want to buy a Radeon R9 290/290X graphics card.

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KitGuru Says: While gamers from the U.K. and Europe can expect further price drops of Radeon R9 290-series graphics cards, people in the U.S. may expect very interesting offerings from stores on Black Friday later this month.

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