AMD drop price of HD 7970, HD7950 and HD 7770

A report from Hardware Canucks says that AMD has officially announced a price reduction for three of their recently released Radeon HD 7000 Series graphics cards. Following the release of NVidia's GTX 680, AMD's price/performance ratio on their high end cards was no longer favorable for many purchasers, so the prices are being lowered from today.

The biggest price drop is on the HD 7970 cards, for which the price has dropped by around $70, to a new price of $479 for reference cards. The cards will now be priced at $20 less than the recommended price for a GTX 680, making them more competitive. As many reviews show the GTX 680 to be a faster card in many benchmarks, this is a sensible move from AMD.

Next in line, we see the price of an HD 7950 drop from $449 to $399, a drop of $50. This brings the price close to that of some non-reference clocked HD 7870, so will likely impact on the sale of those cards. VR-Zone say they have seen price cuts on some HD 7870 cards, although they are not among the prices officially lowered by AMD.

Last in line is the HD 7770. This has had a small price reduction from $159, to $139. This is still a 12.5% drop, so is not to be dismissed. Apparently, the 7800 cards are already good value for money, where the high end cards and the mid-range HD 7770 card are not.

For a limited time, HD 7970 and HD 7950 will ship with three free games. The first of these is Deus Ex: Human Revolution + Missing Link DLC, a current game. Then we will see Dirt: Showdown, a Steam game due in May 2012. Finally, another Steam release due on May 22 2012, there will be Nexuis, a DX11 First Person Shooter game, based on the CryEngine 3.

The new pricing, and the free games, are in effect from today (April 16 2012).