Quote Originally Posted by ClockZ View Post
I agree with ice_chill above, to me its fairly obvious this is NOT the high end part, Is it a great card? Sure.....but not the big one IMO.
I am pretty sure, if we go buy code names, the 7970 would have been designated as a mid range part or sweet spot area. That being it would designated rv1070. The last time their big chip was designated as the high end rx00 was the 2900xt which was their biggest chip ever. Ever since then they have been going with rvx00. The Rx00 being left for their dual chip series.

If we go by the production cost, such as power, pcb, and etc, which people are trying to put gk104 as a rip off and tahiti xt as not. I am almost certain the 7970 will be more similar to a gk104 in production cost, rather than Gk110 or gf110 or gf100. Gx100 are vastly more expensive to make than AMD's rvx70, but AMD decided to price it even higher than that this generation.

To give you an idea, GF100 cost more to make than a 5970, a dual card.

AMD and Nvidia midrange have been always been going after the same market. That being the under 400 market. This time, AMD came out first so they thought to themselves, lets charge high end pricing because we have the performance win. Most of these performance merit were a result of being to 28nm first however and they had no really designed performance wise a truly high end chip(a rx00 chip). What they didn't count on is Nvidia mid range performing like their midrange again, ala 8800gt vs 3870. But rather than set off a price war with AMD, Nvidia followed ship, and now both cards sweet spot cards are much pricier than they are before. If Nvidia is tricking customers, so is AMD.

The difference is Nvidia this time around performance 10% better for more or less 10 percent less, which makes it a much better value. In fact a better value than the 8800gt if we go by pricing vs the competition. 8800gt performed better than the competition but costed more. This just shows how badly the 7970 was priced in the first place.