Partners of Advanced Micro Devices this week started a new round of Radeon R9 290-series price-cuts. Traditionally, companies start to drop prices of graphics adapters in the U.S. and then do the same in other parts of the world.

This week the U.S.-based Newegg store drop prices of Radeon R9 290X graphics cards (2816 stream processors, 176 texture units 64 raster operating pipelines, 512-bit memory bus, 4GB GDDR5 onboard) from Diamond Multimedia and Gigabyte Technology to $279 after $20 mail-in rebate (MiR), whereas Radeon R9 290X from MSI and PowerColor can be purchased for as low as $299 and $309, respectively, after $30 mail-in-rebate.

The same store offers Radeon R9 290 graphics adapters (2560 SPs, 160 TUs, 64 ROPs, 512-bit memory interface and 4GB of GDDR5 onboard) from XFX, Sapphire and HIS for as low as $229 (after $30 MiR), $239 (after $20 MiR) and $249 (after $29 MiR), respectively.

Previously, the lowest price of the Radeon R9 290X graphics cards at Newegg was $299 after $30 MiR, whereas the most affordable Radeon R9 290 was priced at $269. The new prices clearly indicate that the AMD Radeon R9-series family of graphics cards have become more affordable than around a month or two ago.

Earlier this month AMD said that the channel still contains excessive amount of the current-generation Radeon inventory. The company promised not to introduce any new products during the quarter and concentrate on selling through the existing graphics adapters. Therefore, it is not surprising that stores have lowered their prices of the Radeon R9 hardware once again.

“From Q1 to Q2, I think the largest improvement will be around the channel health,” said Lisa Su. “We have had this channel problem for a couple of quarters, and it is important for us to correct that. We definitely reduced some inventory in Q4, and we will take significant action to reduce that inventory in Q1, and that will give us an opportunity to return to a more normal desktop channel business.”

The situation with the prices of the Radeon R9 290-series graphics cards in the U.K. remains stable, but it is highly likely that in the coming weeks retailers will cut prices of the high-end AMD graphics cards.

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KitGuru Says: AMD’s new generation high-end graphics cards are at least three months away. It will be very interesting to see the price of the Radeon R9 290-series offerings in March or April. It is possible that the R9 290 will cost less than $200, whereas the price of the R9 290X will drop to something like $229…

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