Although the R700 Radeon HD 4870 X2 with 2GB of GDDR5 is supposed to be available in late August, ATI has already revealed the price for this card. I was hoping to see it under $500, but I guess the $549 final price is influenced by those 2GB of on-board video memory.

Maybe NVIDIA rushed things with their price slashing. They could have waited a bit more for ATI to announce its prices, but end users can’t complain. The cheapest GTX 280 card can be found on Newegg for $469.99 after a $30 mail in rebate. Prices are clearly going to be further slashed in the next months.
According to Fuzilla, ATI is also planning to release a 4850 X2 version with 1 GB of GDDR5. There’s no official price for this card at the moment, but it can end up costing around $400. We have yet to determine if the 4870 X2 is really worth around $100 more.

Moreover, we shouldn’t be ignoring and underestimating NVIDIA’s 55nm GT200 which could be released this fall. However, if NVIDIA doesn’t care to include GDDR5 in this next version, I dare say it will at most match the performance of the 4870 X2.