Indie voices
For this week’s question to the Brigantia community of independent PC professionals we asked how their relationships with AMD, NVIDIA and Intel have changed over recent years and how the recent GPU price cuts have affected them.
I think the move by AMD into graphics cards with the purchase of ATI was not a match made in heaven. I personally believe NVIDIA would have been a better buy, but too expensive. ATI has never been the first choice of gamers, NVIDIA was along with AMD processors and NVIDIA chipsets.
Intel has managed to keep the large system builders on board despite AMD’s law suits. The move into laptops has made Intel’s position stronger there is no self build laptop platform like the ATX for desktops.
AMD has been championed buy the indies and by self builders for generally offering more bangs for your bucks than Intel. I think AMD’s market share will continue to fall unless they make massive moves towards to providing their traditional market with a laptop platform to work from.
Pricing of most components has always be volatile and too much stock is a mistake. The price reductions also affect the disties and we tend to stock low end GPUs, with higher end stuff bought to order. We tend not to supply high end graphics as the price always drops over time if I wanted to gamble I would go to the bookies. Serious gamers tend to be price savvy and shop online so not really a problem.
The 4850 as reviewed by you is a stonking graphics card around the £150 retail mark and only scores about 6000 less on 3d mark than the 3870 x2. I can’t wait to see the 4870x2 results. I think in 4850 AMD has a match for NVIDIA in the mid range graphics market and has stuck to AMD principles of more bangs for the bucks than the opposition. I think NVIDIA will have their work cut out keeping up with AMD’s aggressive pricing policy. I think more cuts are on the way
Dave – Independent retailer