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Wednesday, December 25, 2013

[Rant] Change of plans. I need a bigger video card than what’savailable.

I like upgrading my PC very much. I guess, a lot of people do. Money is a problem. At least I can afford them for now. But it disappoints me when I don’t get enough in return for the money I spend. The Haswell upgrade one such case.

I just want to upgrade one thing in my PC right now. The graphics card. I want a GTX 780 with the price tag of a R9 290. In fact, yesterday the lowest price of the R9 290 dropped to JPY39,999. (Even though the card is out of stock already) With the JPY being heavily depreciated (now goes for like JPY105/1US$) and the inherent 5% tax, that means the original price was something like $360. You won't be able to get a R9 290 for cheaper than that for a while. In the mean time, the cheapest price of the GTX 780 also dropped to ¥49,980 for a couple of days, but went out of stock.

But I don't want the R9 290 with a reference cooler nor any GTX780 at the current price. R9 290 with custom coolers will be very expensive when they come out. I doubt I'll be able to grab one for less than ¥50,000 until 3 months have passed. That's a huge amount of money considering the fact that you are getting only about 40% more performance compared to the GTX 670. Similarly, the current cheapest GTX780 also costs over ¥50,000. That and the fact that my card's current resale value in Japan being less than ¥20,000, make a graphics card upgrade not very appealing.

So after a lot of thought, I've decided that a current generation high end card like the R9 290 or GTX 780 is not going to work for me. I'm going to wait for Maxwell. That should give me at least a two fold increase in performance hopefully. The GTX 780 Ti when overclocked to 1.1GHz on the core gives a two folder increase in performance already. So it is safe to assume that Maxwell will deliver better. It seems they are coming out in February. Just rumors though.

NVDA_Maxwell_Roadmap

Now, inevitably the prices will be very high at launch. That's the way these shops roll. Scumbags! Cannot help.

However, I won't be making any promises. If I find a deal that I cannot say no to, I might jump on it. But I will at least wait for AMD's Mantle to flex its muscle. The last thing I want is to get an NVidia card and then find out that Mantle works amazingly well.
I know it's all sad news for me, but that doesn't means it's the end of the gadgets for me for this year. There is a week to go. Even though our year end bonus is hopeless this time around, that DSLR idea just got a big boost.

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