GeForce 8800 GT and Radeon HD 3870 - Current UK Availability

[Hanners]

With Christmas fast approaching, for many a graphics geek across the land there is only one item at the top of their wish list from Santa this year - The latest high performing, reasonably priced parts from NVIDIA and ATI, the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB and Radeon HD 3870 512MB respectively.

However, in recent weeks the availability, or rather lack thereof, of these parts has become almost legendary, with boards becoming almost as rare as gold dust, and with inflated prices to boot. Now we're virtually a couple of weeks away from Christmas day, how easy is it to find these two graphics boards in the UK, and how much will you need to shell out? Elite Bastards investigate.

Overall then, although availability of these two boards isn't a complete disaster here in the UK, it's a long, long way from being ideal for either consumers or ATI and NVIDIA's AIB partners - At a time of year when sales are likely to soar, the fact that the vast majority of partners simply can't satisfy demand and get boards in stock with just a couple of weeks until Christmas is a very depressing one, leading to inflated prices for you and me and less money made for manufacturers.

When we first started seeing shortages of the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB, we expected ATI to jump in with both feet, flooding the market with Radeon HD 3870 parts to capitalise on NVIDIA's shortfall. Quite simply, this hasn't happened, and it now seems that Radeon HD 3870 parts are in fact harder to come by than their NVIDIA counterparts, reducing even the impact of their lower pricing.

Read the full article at Elite Bastards.