AMD Radeon HD 7970, 7950, 7870 Price Cuts Inbound. 7970GE Available Next Week?

For those of you in the market for a new video card, in case April’s round of AMD Radeon price cuts didn’t quite meet your desires, AMD has ordered up another round of price cuts that will be taking effect on Monday.

The Radeon HD 7970, Radeon HD 7950, and Radeon HD 7870 are all getting official price cuts. The 7970 will be dropping from $479 to $429, the 7950 from $399 to $349, and the 7870 from $349 to $299.

With all of that said however, as we’re in the middle of a product cycle with partners shipping custom cards, in practice AMD doesn’t have a great deal of control over final card pricing beyond what they charge partners for parts. So unofficially these prices have been in effect for some time since partners and stores have not been holding to AMD’s MSRPs. Indeed as of Friday evening the cheapest cards on Newegg are already below AMD’s official MSRPs, so today’s announcement mainly serves to bring attention to price movements that have already happened.

On that note, AMD sends word that their free game promotions will continue to be active for some time, including both the HD 7900 Series Three For Free promotion and their HD 7800/7700 series DiRT Showdown promotion (though Newegg seems to have deactivated it as of this writing).

Finally, we’ve been asking AMD about the status of the new 7970 GHz Edition, which has so far been missing in action. After originally being scheduled to have limited availability in late June with wider availability in early July, the 7970GE has slipped by at least a couple of weeks – an unusual thing to happen to what has otherwise been a punctual AMD. At this time AMD is telling us that most of their partners have decided to launch the 7970GE on their customized premium cards, which has resulted in availability being pushed back. If all goes according to plan, AMD is expecting XFX and Sapphire to have cards available early next week. However prices will bear keeping an eye on since it’s unlikely that partners will stick to the $499 MSRP if they’re using the 7970GE for their premium cards.