These seem to be the two best cards and the pricing on them varies very significantly. For instance, the PCS Pro+ varied between $650 and $460 over a two month period (I just missed that $460 price not realizing this). I’m using camelcamelcamel.com and just monitoring a newegg.com wish list to try get a good price.
It is inconvenient because you have to correlate the price with relative performance. Here are the ones we are monitoring:
- Gigabyte GTX 780 Ti Windforce OC. 142.6. $610 Newegg (4/5 of 19)
- MSI Radeon R9 290X Lightning 132.7. $685 (Newegg), $700 (Amazon 5/5/2)
- HIS R9 290X IceQ X2 Turbo 130.7. Turbo not available on Newegg or Amazon
- Powercolor R9 290X PCS+. 130.4. $550/530 (Newegg 4/5 of 37), $470 (Amazon, 4.5/5 of 7)
- ASUS R9 290X DirectCU II OC. 130.0. $410 (Newegg 3/5 of 30 only!). $570 (Amazon 4/5 of 19)
- Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X OC. 127.3. $549 (newegg 4/5 of 49), $548 (amazon 4/5 of 20)
- MSI R9 290X Gaming OC. 127.2. $570-$50-$30=$490 Newegg (4/5 of 17) or 545-15=530 (Amazon, but 3.5/5 due to support of 7). It is factory overclocked to 1040Mhz
- HIS R9 290X IceQ X2 Turbo (in closed case) 127.2. Not available
- Gigabyte R9 290 X Windforce OC VG-R929XOC-4GD. 127.1. Lots of Newegg and Amazon complaints. $500 (Newegg), $520 (3.5/5.0)
- Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X OC (in closed case) 126.9. $549 Newegg/Amazon
- MSI Radeon R9 290X Gaming OC (in closed case). $570
- GeForce Titan Windforce 1GHz. 127.9
- Gigabyte Ri 290X Windforce OC (in closed case). 126.3
- ASUS R9 290X DirectCU II OC (in closed case) 122.3
- Radeon R9 290X Reference . 107.3
