ATI has decided to increase the prices of Radeon HD 5850 cards due to huge demand and effective immediately the Radeon 5850 will cost any given partner some $15 to $20 more.

AMD / ATI still has an good supply of HD 5850 and since HD 5870 are very tough to get, they simply decided to try to make more money. The fact that GTX 260 and 285 are also insanely hard to find and that Fermi is still not out, helps ATI jack the prices up.

High end supply from both Nvidia and ATI was not this weak for years, as this time both companies are not executing well. Before, if one company didn't manage to have enough cards, the other one would win that business over, but this time, we are talking about both players failing to have enough high end cards.

The price of Radeon HD 5870 remains the same.