For the past few days, rumours have been floating around the internet that NVIDIA was preparing to drop the cost of its GTX 460 GPUs. It turns out that there may be some truth to them, though, as we're already seeing retailers drop the prices of the company's latest cards by as much as £25.
While the 768MB versions were retailing for around £140 last week - and over £150 on launch-day - Scan is now offering a stock-clocked Palit GTX 460 for a hair above £125 including VAT. The same model is also available at MicroDirect for £116.
The reductions on the 1GB models are less dramatic, but they can still be found for as little as £167 - well below the £183 that they were selling for at launch.
This is a major drop for a card that's only been on the market for a few months, especially when all reports indicate that the card is selling like hot-cakes.
The new pricing puts the GTX 460 squarely up against AMD's mid-range 1GB Radeon HD 5770. It's also around £30 cheaper than the Radeon 5830, which offers similar performance to NVIDIA's card. In fact, it's now possible to buy two of the GF104-based cards for less than one factory-overclocked Radeon HD 5850. We can only assume that this pressure will cause AMD to respond in kind, dropping its own prices accordingly.
This move may also have an interesting effect on the pricing of the upcoming GTS 450. The mid-level card was suspected to launch for around £115, but at that price, an extra £10 - or less - would buy the much more powerful GTX 460.
So far we've only seen two cards with the lower pricing, so will have to wait and see if other manufacturers will pass on the new prices in the coming days.
