AMD Releases The R7 265 Slashing Pricing On The Midrange Market

AMD releases the R7 265 slashing pricing on the midrange market. It seems as if AMD the one who is usually a follower is trying to be the leader by aggressively changing the way they do things. Altering their GPU roadmap with a card that will fit right in at the $150.00 price point AMD has done a quick trick that should propel them into 2014 with a bang. That card is the all-new R7-265 a card that will be priced to sell fast and coming it at $150 the card will surely gather the attention of gamers on a budget.

It seems as if the card will be a rebadged 28nm GCN R7-270 albeit with a few cores missing and a larger memory interface. AMD’s Bonaire (Still makes me giggle) will be replacing the $180 Cape Verde chipset. This was the chipset that was used on the Radeon 7770, but this card in testing was beaten by its own brand-mates as well as the GTX 650/650TI from NVIDIA leaving AMD with a weak spot in their lineup. AMD made a snap decision and then came back with the 7790, which happened to be a much faster card with 896 GPU cores.

Although it was not known at the time AMD’s CGN 1.1 instruction set is shared by both that chipset and the new Hawaii core cards being released now that supports TrueAudio as well. The only drawback to the Bonaire chipset is that it has a limitation of 128GB on the memory interface, which made the card slower to cards like NVIDIA’s GTX 650 Ti Boost that has a 192-bit memory interface. AMD did a lot of rebranding last year, but the positioning of products did not change only the names of the cards being presented. The R7-260X is a 2GB card that costs $140, but the GTX 650 Ti Boost was still beating it so AMD countered that by lowering the price of the 260X from $150 down to $120 a $30 savings.

Now priced at $120 the 260X is positioned against the GTX 650 and the GTX 650 Ti Boost. The 260X beats the 650 without a problem and should go head to head with the 650 Ti, which is great positioning for AMD making them the go-to guys for the mid range market at this point in time. This may all seem a bit confusing as AMD has their cards stacked right up against each other. Lets take a look at the current lineup: The R7-250 begins the lineup at $90, followed by the 25X at $100, the 260 at $110 and now the R7-260X at $120 so you can see everything is quite compressed in this market. The price point on the 260X is about 33% higher than the R7-250, but the card is also almost twice as fast making it a very solid deal for the money.

AMD is starting out 2014 very strongly and these are probably just the first of many price drops we see this year. When taking a look at the roadmap that AMD is currently adhering to you can see that there are many more very significant price drops coming still later this year. NVIDIA most likely has a launch coming right around the corner which propelled AMD to make these drastic changes, but that always ends up being good news to the end user who saves money when buying a new video card. AMD has been relying very heavily on their APU platform and the results so far seem very good for the market it is intended for. The next year should really show how well people embrace them and having the new A10-7850K that is priced right combined with a good video card seems to be a sweet spot for many gamers who want performance, but cannot afford the high price. Pay attention to the mid-range market over the next few weeks because things will be getting shaken up quite a bit. Thanks for reading Tech Of Tomorrow folks.

Source: ExtremeTech