Cheap ultra-high end Radeons are upon us

For those of you who can't wait until the Radeon X1950 to debut on the 27th, ATI has already started to cut pricing on the ASICs for the Radeon X1900 series cards: Radeon X1900 CrossFire, X1900XTX, X1900XT and X1900GT. Essentially, all of the ATI cards have shifted down a price tier, leaving the top $500 price tag open for the Radeon X1950.

The pricing change began to affect some merchants early this week, with the majority of the merchants following suit now. Here are a few of the average price changes over the last few days:

* ATI Radeon X1900 512MB CrossFire: $375, down from $500
* ATI Radeon X1900XTX 512MB: $370, down from $500
* ATI Radeon X1900XT 512MB: $310, down from $370
* ATI Radeon X1900GT 256MB: $280, down from $310
* Sapphire Radeon X1900GT 256MB: $230, down from $250

Although the price reduction has mostly affected built-by-ATI cards, Sapphire and PowerColor are also starting to see some movement on the new pricing. Expect to see the rest of the industry follow shortly, and definitely expect to see all pricing adjusted before August 27th. ATI distributors claim there will be some availability of Radeon X1950 on the launch day.

The Radeon X1950 is ATI's first GDDR4 graphics card. The card is expected to fill in the pricing tier of the older Radeon X1900s.

ATI plans to keep the X1900 XT alive when it launches the new X1950 XTX and XT cards. Despite the marginal performance difference it won’t get rid of the X1900 XTX and XT cards at once.

It will sell them side by side with X1950 cards until supplies last and we are sure ATI has to drop the price of the X1900 cards to keep selling them.

X1950 XTX will be set at an aggressive €399, so it won't be easy to sell the remaining X1900 XTX cards but as we said before the performance difference is only seven per cent.

ATI plans to keep both 256 and 512MB versions until it completely gets rid of them and replaces them at some later date.