There's nothing that floats a KitGuru's boat like an intelligent bundle and that's appealing and does not add to the cost of a product you wanted to buy anyway. nVidia did a great bundle with Lost Planet in the past and it's something that we try to take into account when making a purchase.
Go back around 6 years and MSI would create huge retail boxes for Europe with '14+3′ bundles announced on the outside of the packaging. The idea was that you would get 14 pieces of software that, honestly, no one really cared about, together with 3 that were quite decent and you might want to have a go on.
But that's quite different from bundling a genuine top seller.
Right now, while some of the GTX680 cards do have a Max Payne bundle, the GTX660 cards we have seen in the market appear to be ‘card only' packaging. That doesn't mean that a bundle won't be included at some stage – just that the original packaging/offer does not allow for it.
So what scheme has AMD hatched? Well it seems that, alongside the major price moves at the high-end which we reported on yesterday and the day before, they are also going to be bundling Sleeping Dogs with these cards. This game went to the number one spot in the UK at launch and is likely to be one of the top 5 best sellers of the year, so it's a pretty impressive title to pack in with a graphic card.
On a 3GB 7950 at £239 the ‘additional effective price reduction' from the game bundle won't be as strong as it would on a 2GB 7850 at just £155, but it's still adding a little spice. Not sure if every card will qualify for a special download code, but we understand that the game has been made available to all of AMD's serious partners.
KitGuru says: Right now, with the high end graphic cards, we have a similar feeling to the one we had with SSDs around 2 months ago. The value proposition just keeps getting stronger. Sure, it will need to level off, but that's not happening yet. Roll on the GTX660 price cuts.
Comment below or in the KitGuru forums.