It needs to drop, and quickley.  And $299 for the GTX 260 is still too much.  It needs to go to $250 or less to be competetive.

Great to see some good competition going on here ^^

Price wars are fun every body wins !!!!! It just turned into a buyers market. Now maybe a week and i will pony up on a gtx260 after the price goes down. Was gonna go 9800gtx glad i waited.

Dont have to worry about me you have to be patient when your po!One of these days Im going to catch up with you Big Dogs!!:]

 This is great news. I guess I was right after all luckily for everyone.

You had to know this was coming - all reviews and articles comparing the cards cited that what HH cited as well -- why not just save some $$ and go X-fire with some 4850s for $200 less than a GTX 280?

Apparently nVidia finally caught on to what is going on, although I think $499 is still a bit much seeing as 4850 x 2 would only set you back ~$400....

Also as was said already the 260 will not sell for crap @ $299....The only buyers with would be an nVidia fanboi that cannot quite afford a 280 and refuses to go ATI (so obviously no one with any sense...)

Overall very good to hear! ATI back in the game = lower n lower prices on vid cards. Now that darned x4 should hurry up and catch Intel and we'll really be in business

Radeon 4870 > GTX 260.  I wouldn't buy a 260 if I were you, warlord.

Thank God.

A $250 260 would be a very viable option IMO, but the question is: when will we see that kind of price without a rebate?

I just grabbed a MSI NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 oc'd at 650MHz for $499.99 plus a $40.00 rebate at Newegg. I was going to wait, but $459.99 was to good to pass up. I'm outta luck on ATI cards, stuck with Nvidia cards due to my eVga 790i ultra sli board. This is a new build and  I was going to replace my 8800 gtx with the 9800 gtx X2 till the 280 came out. I just didn't want to go above 500 for the card.

Now Nvidia will do a die shrink, up the speed, add a few improvements, drop the price, and I'll be screwed. Damn, I wish I had a little more patience.

Patience is a virtue.

yeah anyone who wants any of these cards ATI or NVIDIA should give it a week or 2 at least as I imagine they all will drop a bit even the 4870 x2 and I think the 280 will go to closer to 400 even

Ryley:

I just grabbed a MSI NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 oc'd at 650MHz for $499.99 plus a $40.00 rebate at Newegg. I was going to wait, but $459.99 was to good to pass up. I'm outta luck on ATI cards, stuck with Nvidia cards due to my eVga 790i ultra sli board. This is a new build and  I was going to replace my 8800 gtx with the 9800 gtx X2 till the 280 came out. I just didn't want to go above 500 for the card.

Now Nvidia will do a die shrink, up the speed, add a few improvements, drop the price, and I'll be screwed. Damn, I wish I had a little more patience.

I'm not sure I understand why you can't use ATI cards, your using only one GPU right? Unless you are using multiple GPU's SLI/Crossfire doesn't matter.

 It's true -- if you have an nVidia chipset, an ATI card will work just fine in the setup.

In fact I was using a 680i mobo with a 1950PRO just fine with fine performance -- only drawback is if like Savage said you want to run x-fire or SLI

I saw this on hardocp and they showed the price the partners pay and the retail price. I though the partner price was the drop and I was excited. Then I noticed that I was wrong and was like WOW thats the drop! still not worth it.

That had to hurt like hell for NVidia. $150 less per card = a lot of lost money. But great for us. Still way too much if you ask me. A 4870 at less than $300 comes close enough for me to say to hell with it, I'll save the $200+ and buy some more RAM and some beer. ;)

 

This is good news, but still too expensive compared to ATI's new cards!