AMD Slashes Prices on Radeon 7000 Series Graphics Cards

The marketing team over at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) just dropped us a line to give us a heads up regarding upcoming price cuts to the Sunnyvale chip designer's Radeon HD 7000 Series graphics cards. New lower MSRPs officially go into effect on Monday, July 16, 2012 and include the following updated prices:
  • Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition: $499
  • Radeon HD 7970: $429
  • Radeon HD 7950: $349
  • Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition: $299
  • Radeon HD 7850: $249

To sweeten the pot, several of the above cards will come with freebie extras. The Radeon HD 7900 Series, for example, feature a 'Three-for-Free' promotion that includes (while supplies last) three DirectX 11 titles, while the Radeon HD 7800 Series will ship with a free copy of Dirt Showdown (also while supplies last).

AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition

If that weren't enough, AMD points out that its newest Catalyst suite delivers big time performance gains in some areas.

"In addition to the pricing updates, every one of our AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series products received a significant performance bump with our recent AMD Catalyst 12.7 drivers," AMD said in statement. "By delivering higher performance in top games such as Skyrim (>30 percent), Shogun 2 (>15 percent) and Batman Arkham City (>30 percent), Graphics Core Next continues to get better with ever driver release."

The new pricing puts AMD's graphics lineup in better position to compete with NVIDIA's Kepler architecture from a bang-for-buck perspective. And while the updated prices are supposed to go into effect on Monday, some retailers have already marked the cards down.