AMD Radeon Pro Duo Pricing Free Falls To $799 Ahead Of Vega Launch
You wouldn’t be alone if you somehow forgot about AMD’s Radeon Pro Duo; the exotic graphics card that came bearing two 28nm Fiji GPUs, 8GB of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and a high-end, closed-loop water-cooling system to keep everything cool. The Radeon Pro Duo is able to put down some impressive benchmark scores (thanks to its 16 TFLOPs of single-precision compute performance), but it was largely overshadowed by NVIDIA’s looming (at the time) Pascal graphics family, particularly the GeForce GTX 1080 and Titan X. And we can’t forget that $1,499 price tag.
Thankfully, AMD is giving well-to-do gamers something to celebrate about thanks to an epic price cut for the Radeon Pro Duo. Rather than the $1,499 price that it was saddled with at launch, AMD has lopped $700 off the MSRP, bringing it down to a “mere” $799. That still may be too much for some gamers, considering that they can get a GeForce GTX 1080 for less than $600 on Amazon, but it’s still a great price for a remarkable piece of hardware.
If you’re brave enough to take the plunge, Newegg is currently selling the XFX Radeon Pro Duo R9-PROD-8VRW on its site for $799.
It should come as no surprise why AMD is slashing prices; the company is looking to clear our inventory ahead of Vega’s launch during the first half of 2017. Vega will also be a beastly GPU, and should far surpass the performance of its Fiji- and Polaris-based predecessors. Vega is built on a 14nm FinFET manufacturing process and uses second generation HBM (HBM2). HBM2 offers twice the bandwidth per-pin, is more efficient and fits into a smaller footprint than HBM.
Vega was recently spied paired with AMD’s equally new Ryzen processor running Doom at 4K Ultra settings. In this configuration, Vega was able to spit out over 60 FPS, which is music to the ears of hardcore gamers.
