GTX570 spotted £50 down, will sales of GTX480 stop overnight?

We've never met anyone who's bought anything from More Computers, but their customers certainly seem happy with them. Their home page looks like a monument to how much their customers love them. Today, they will probably love them more.

KitGuru broke the world exclusive story yesterday that the GTX570 has been launched at was initially being traded around the £299 mark. There was a slight scuffle on price as we saw another UK vendor go to £295, because a third came up at £335.

When you see that kind of price splatter, you can understand that nVidia is probably looking to set a price that is over £300 at launch, because they will want to flush out the old GTX480 stock. However, it is a competitive market place and we're now seeing the price being dropped rapidly.

More Computers are now down at £286. How much lower can the price fall?

It could be that More Computers has a cheaper product than the CD-Writer company who went at £335, but the descriptions of the PNY card look identical.

More likely is that the £335 price is following some kind of nVidia guidance, while the market itself is hungry to get those Christmas bucks and will happily sacrifice a few points of margin to get the customer onto their web site.

nVidia's Ben Berraondo has said that 2010 started as a tough year, but that he was optimistic that the GTX5xx series would put his company back on top. With aggressive launches and price drops like we've seen on the GTX570, he might well be right.

Why do we think the GTX480 sales could stop overnight? Well, the new GTX570 is a second generation chip, so it's better designed, better made, cooler and more efficient. The core speed is faster than the GTX480 – balanced by the slower/narrower memory. Expect benchmark results to be almost identical.

Against that backdrop, stores like Scan had the older GTX480 at more than £300 when we checked this morning.

Enthusiasts are unlikely to buy last year's technology for more.

KitGuru says: Assuming that the higher price is the recommendation from nVidia, then seeing the pricing on a new card dropping from £335 to £285 is unheard of. That's a 15% price drop almost overnight. The only winner here is you, the KitGuru reader. And that's a good thing, right?

Comments below or over here in the KitGuru forum.

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