NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 400 Series Shows Up Early


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As some of our <a href="http://forums.anandtech.com/showthre...065677">astute forum readers</a> have noticed, NVIDIA&rsquo;s GeForce GTX 400 series have started showing up early. Officially they have been and are still scheduled for a full retail launch next week, but for the past few days a few of them have been showing up in small batches at etailers.</p>
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We shot off a quick question to NVIDIA about the matter and got a response last night. The gist of the matter is that NVIDIA started shipping the first retail GTX 400 boards to their partners last Saturday, which means that those partners with a fast turnaround time in boxing and air shipping have already managed to get them in to etailers&rsquo; hands. NVIDIA isn&rsquo;t enforcing a hard launch date here, so everyone is allowed to sell their cards as soon as they can.</p>
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Even with this initial availability, NVIDIA is sticking to their official line that broad availability won&rsquo;t be until next week. This allows for all of their partners to catch up, since not everyone had such a fast turnaround time. This also allows for larger batches to make their way in to etailers&rsquo; hands, since larger batches are almost always sent via a slower method of shipping. In any case, current availability shouldn&rsquo;t be considered representative of what we&rsquo;ll see next week according to NVIDIA.</p>
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As for current availability and pricing, it&rsquo;s highly variable. Some etailers are holding to MSRP and as such are quickly selling out, while other etailers are charging more than MSRP (e.g. $400 for a GTX 470) and still have cards in stock. The fact that anyone is charging MSRP right now is a good sign that pricing shouldn&rsquo;t get too far out of hand, but we&rsquo;ll have to see how things go next week. In the mean time if you&rsquo;re dying to have a GTX 400 card, you should be able to get a GTX 470 right now but you&rsquo;re going to be paying entirely too much for it.</p>
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We&rsquo;ll have more on this next week once the GTX 400 series reaches broad availability.</p>
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