It seems that the price is definitely right for the enthusiasts out there looking for the fastest card available. Hovering around $500 on launch date is not bad compared to the $650 plus of the Radeon HD 5970 or other previous Nvidia selections.
UPDATE: The Sapphire 5970 can currently be found at NewEgg with a price of $469 after mail in rebate!
"The NVIDIA GTX 580 is clearly a tempting card, particularly for those enthusiasts who still feel some love for old green. But can the company be competitive with pricing?
When we aired our piece on the upcoming card yesterday, many commented that the card was going to be "$600" and hence a poor deal.
Those fears seemed largely unwarranted. NVIDIA is officially pricing the hot card at $499 USD. While NewEgg.com lists all of the cards at $570 USD or more (UPDATE: Half of the cards can not be had for $559, with the GIGABYTE GV-N580D5-15I-B available at $549), a 10 percent promo code takes the cost down to around the $500 target price ($520 to be more precise). Considering that you can snag a GTX 480 for as cheap as $429 USD, the overall picture becomes a bit more clear -- you can get a roughly 10 percent real world performance increase by paying roughly 20.9 percent extra. That's reasonably competitive in the enthusiast world.
That said, NVIDIA and AMD clearly have different operating philosophies. AMD launched its first 6000 series cards (in the Barts subfamily) -- the Radeon 6850 and 6870 -- late last month. Really, these cards couldn't be farther from the GTX 580 in terms of target audience.
The Radeon 6850 and 6870 retail for a target price of $179 USD and $239 USD respectively. That means that you could pick up two (!) Radeon 6870s, and still pocket $40, for the price it would take you to obtain the beastly Geforce GTX 580."
