Having had a look around at actual RX 480 owners it seems that people on very low budgets seem to be buying them in truck loads.
I've seen them paired with a CPU you can get for about £3.
This is good though. The more PC gamers we bring in the better the games get. I remember the last "gold rush" era when the AMD XP was around and you could build a nigh top end PC for around $300 using a XP 1800+ Nforce 2 board and Radeon 9200 Pro. IIRC the CPU was about $80, board $60 GPU was $120 and a case and PSU was pretty much nothing.
And we saw some incredible games during that era (Underground 1&2 for example).
I'm hoping AMD make a Zen quad core or something for around $80. A decent £60 CPU, it's been a while... Can't see it though but they may do a Zen based quad core Athlon with lower clocks for that much.
What we need to see is PCs costing less than consoles. So $300 would be absolutely spot on as it was before
i cant see a pc being less than or equal too $300 to be honest..
even if amd pull out a worth while cpu for minimal cost, but lets imagine a setup in an ideal world for a min spec 1080p system,
basic atx/matx (I mean the bear essentials 2 ram slots, 1 pcie x16 slot 1 pci slot, 4 sata headers.) and that would be about $40-$50,
then you have a hypothetical amd or intel quad chip with similar performance to the bulldozer 8320 boosts up to 3.5ghz.. (just enough again) and say that costs about $100-$120.
then you have your 480 which is $200.
Simple case, lets say ~$40
Psu at about $70.
2x4gb unbranded ram at ~$14
throw in a 1tb Sata Hdd ~$50
And you are looking at.. $514. and that is without monitor keyboard and mouse etc..
and honestly your looking at about $200 for a 1080p monitor + keyboard and mouse.. and even then you arent going above 22 inch monitor..
So I can see a full gaming setup being available for about $715 which would do 1080p gaming.. But not for $300 at least not for a brand new system..
having said that if we consider potential OEM prices then it could drop the price considerably, but even then i cannot imagine it reaching the $300 target. Not for a 1080p capable machine any way..
Still $715 is pretty good for 1080p capable i think, and some company's could probably throw it together and sell it for about $650 or possibly less and still make a proffit, Which would help a lot really.
You have people wandering around thinking you need to spend that much on a gpu to do pc gaming, but it would be nice to see people like dell, and hewlet packard "or whoever may still be doing that sort of stuff" throwing in 480's in to some of their older unsold systems. 2gen i5's and what have you.. and then selling those for about $400 just to get rid of the unsold older ones they have.
because that would help a lot.
