AMD Partners Debate Radeon HD 4870 Price

Although ATI reduced the price of its Radeon HD 4870 last week to better compete with Nvidia's GTS 250 rebranding, apparently ATI's partners don't think the price reduction is such a good idea.

Last week we reported that AMD planned to slash the pricing of its Radeon D 4800 series. The initial hacking would begin with the Radeon HD 4870 512 MB cards, taking a $50 hit in price reduction, thus now costing consumers $149 USD. Additionally, the Radeon HD 4850 512 MB would also take a cut in price, with a new discounted tag of $129 USD and offering consumers great performance for little money. However, the reduced prices wouldn't come in the form of an immediate discount, but rather through mail-in rebates.

But according to DailyTech, many AMD partners took to the new 4850 pricing but ultimately rejected the new 4870 pricing. Why? Because they feel that the 4870 outperforms Nvidia's equally priced GTX 260 and should directly compete with the card rather than the GTS 250. On a technical level, AMD's Radeon HD 4870 offers better hardware including 800 stream processors, a core clocking at 750 MHz, a memory clock of 900 MHz using GDDR5, and a 256-bit memory bus. Nvidia's GTX 260, on the other hand, offers 216 stream processors, a core clock of 576 MHz, a memory clock of 999 MHz and a 448-bit memory bus.

With that said, AMD partners insist that the 1 GB version of ATI's Radeon HD 4850 compete against the 1 GB version of Nvidia's GTS 250 at the $149 price point. "The AMD lineup is very strong, and we feel the 4850 should go against the GTS 250 and the 4870 against the GTX 260," an unnamed Taiwanese source told DailyTech.

So what should be the set price for AMD's Radeon HD 4870? Currently ATI partners have not revealed a suggested price point, and thus far, AMD is still sticking by its original reduced price of $149 after the mail-in rebate. Perhaps ATI will lower the 4850 price tag even more, giving Nvidia's GTS 250 as run for its money.