Home / Gaming / AMD’s R9 290 & 290X Massive Price Hikes Stay Consistent, How Long Will They Last?

AMD’s R9 290 & 290X Massive Price Hikes Stay Consistent, How Long Will They Last?

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Updated: February 16, 2014
2014-02-14

I think for most of us when we think of AMD, we think of a great price to performance ratio and killer “bang for your buck” products. The problem is though, that recently an insane demand for AMD’s graphics cards in particular has caused prices to sky-rocket at retailers.

TechSpot wrote an article yesterday that inspired this post, talking about the 30-50% price hikes on AMD’s R9 290 and 290X video cards that have taken place here in North America. Currently as I write this, the Sapphire R9 290X is selling for $800+ on Amazon. When the 290X initially launched, it was priced at $550 and would sell between there and $600 which made it a great performer for the price and was a legitimate option to choose over NVIDIA’s GTX 780. The problem is that NVIDIA released the 780 Ti which at this moment is selling for $719.99, which is obviously cheaper than the now inflated R9 290X and not only beats it in performance but has much higher headroom for over-clocking.

We recently got our hands on Gigabyte’s R9 290X Windforce OC Edition which did a significant job better cooling the card compared to the reference R9 290X but performance wasn’t drastically better and with the price increase, it’s hard to recommend it for the money.

Some are blaming the price jumps on coin mining, others are simply saying demand for great price to performance products is higher than production can keep up with. Either way, we’re at an awkward point in time in the GPU market as typically AMD is the better priced product but in this case, it simply isn’t. For now the question is how long will these price hikes last and if they do come down, will it even matter by then? Let us know your thoughts on the situation and also if you still plan on picking up one of these cards regardless of price.

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  • Mental

    It is absolutely in response to the demand for these cards in the coin mining industry. AMDs architecture is unmatched when it comes to hashing out those algorithms. You cannot find these cards anywhere, and if you do, you will be paying top dollar.

    • Dani Filth

      Yeah everything is going up in prices not sure if it has anything to do with the people going on strikes to raise minimum wage. Now people are getting laid off to balance the company budget, prices for everything else is going up. Im like hot damn i was about to buy a thermaltake frio for 49$ now its up to 80$ ASrock am3 970 extreme 3 board for 65$ now up to 80$ im like wtf!!!

    • Elijah Daugherty

      I’ve heard about CUDA mining. So nvidia cards may be seeing a price hike too.
      Great….

  • Fiberton

    I have been purchasing 1000s of dollars in gear a year from Newegg for 10 years. After the 900 dollar 290X I seen from them.. They can fuck themselves. Not one more penny.

    • Sean Smith

      It is not their fault people are buying these cards at massively inflated prices. People are making legit money off these cards. Newegg is just riding it out.

      You can’t tell me you wouldn’t do the same if you had 1,000 R9 290Xs. Businesses exist to make money, and Newegg is doing just that.

      Blame it on the miners for making them raise the prices.

      • bells

        yes they do. when they got called out my pcper, they instantly changed the price to 699. and asus went damage control too, they pulled all of their 290-290x cards in newegg

        • bells

          called out by*

  • rhinitis

    I have 2 EVGA GTX 780 SC with the ACX cooler and will wait till next tax season to upgrade.

  • Austin Malberg

    I forked out $550 for the r9 290 wind force OC from Australia. Really wasn’t too fussed with the price hike.

  • Mr Douche

    its just an over-flated price bracket right now because everyone is having an orgy over AMD’s Mantle when it fact it does hardly anything in performance in mid-to-high end desktops but everyone is under the impression that they’ll get MASSIVE frame rate increases which isn’t quite correct. There is only a slight bump of 2-5FPS which is nothing and only helps lower end hardware alleviate CPU bottlenecks.

    One peeps get to grips with this and realize that mantle isn’t “quite” as good as its been made out to be.. the high demand for AMD cards will dip, especially when Nvidia release their 800 series desktop GPUs which are rumored to have an ARM processor on them.

  • Jerry Izaguirre

    keep in mind people are getting their tax returns and from personal experience it seems like they spend more money. than on chrismass. add that to mining and prices wont drop until summer, if anything.

  • Josue Hernandez

    i really hate that i was saving money to buy the AMD R9 280x but now it cost like $150 more than the original price so now im going to buy the GTX 770.

  • Mitch Baker

    I’m like i’ll check out newegg to see what they have. Out of stock, Out of stock, Out of stock, Out of stock, Out of stock. Well i guess the prices don’t matter there too much. Lol

  • Elijah Daugherty

    I feel bad for amd. All the retailers are making them look bad

  • Etienne Boutet boucher

    R9 270 and R9 270X cost like 75+ more now, it’s ridiculous.

  • bustment

    One word… Hyperinflation