After a very turbulent month of November, we are just now getting time to sit and relax and take it all in.  What the hell actually happened last month??!? 

Well, for one thing, a lot of GPUs were released.  Searches for the NVIDIA 8800 GT cards are still coming up mostly empty even though I was very impressed with the technology.  If you can find them now, they tend to be priced higher than the expected MSRPs which obviously takes a lot of the bite out of the product. 

Half of AMD’s new HD 3800 series GPU is doing quite well though: the HD 3850 cards are in stock at numerous places today after a short period of absence.  More importantly and impressively though, they are actually showing up UNDER the $179 MSRP AMD gave us on launch day — Diamond has a card going for $169 as I write this.  And just to top that, Newegg has an overclocked MSI HD 3850 selling for $169 as well!

The HD 3870’s situation isn’t as rosy, as the only part that shows up in our pricing engine is a Visiontek unit selling $60 above the MSRP from Dell.  Newegg has seven HD 3870 SKUs in there system but all show up as out of stock.  But, vigilent readers be on the look out!  The estimated in-stock date on these cards is 12/6 – that’s this Thursday!