AMD’s RDNA 3 graphics cards are about to hit shelves, and we picked up the price of a few third-party XFX models from Amazon listings that have now been pulled down – not before they were featured on Twitter .
Regular hardware leaker @momomo_us shared the product listings for XFX Speedster Merc 310 versions of the RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT via a tweet (marked by video cardz (opens in new tab)).
The 7900 XTX is AMD’s next-generation flagship, and according to the price tag on Amazon, the Speedster Merc version of XFX will cost $1,100 in the US, which is a hundred dollars more than the reference board. The 7900 XT card costs $979, which is $80 more than the MSRP of the reference model in the US.
As mentioned earlier, these prices no longer appear on the respective product pages on Amazon, so someone noticed the leaked information and removed it.
For the uninitiated, the reference version of a graphics card – the board’s most basic incarnation, built to AMD’s standard specs – is always cheaper than custom variants, which have more powerful clocks and better components (plus more effective cooling), so they’ll clearly be more expensive.
Sure, they run a bit faster for the extra outlay, as you might expect, though the difference is often not that great (they can perhaps be pushed much further with overclocking than vanilla boards, mind you, for those enthusiasts taking part in that endeavor).
Analysis: a hint that the price might be right (or at least not wrong)
The main point to focus on here is that the XFX Speedster Merc 310 is not much more expensive than the reference model at 10% more (actually 9% in the case of the 7900 XT).
This strongly contradicts the disturbing rumor recently aired that AMD’s custom offering of RDNA 3 cards would be a lot more expensive than the reference incarnations (and that they could also make up the majority of the stock in the early days).
A 10% markup seems reasonable for this XFX model, especially considering that the Speedster Merc is a more expensive variant of this graphics card maker, one of the kind of models that the rumor mongers feared would be exorbitantly expensive (RTX 4080 style , In other words).
Of course, we don’t know if these prices will turn out to be correct, so we should approach this leak with some trepidation, as pre-release prices may be placeholders. While Amazon is a more reliable source of such leakage than some of the small European retailers who often pop up with early pricing, especially considering we’re only days away from the launch of RDNA 3 graphics cards.
If this turns out to be true, then it will give Nvidia even more reason to drop RTX 4080 prices, something that has also been rumored to be in the cards lately. Team Green may need to stay more competitive against its rival and boost RTX 4080 sales, and we also discussed the possibility that lowering the asking price of the 4080 might be necessary to make room for the incoming rumored RTX 4070 Ti competitively priced. at the right level (a rather tricky price puzzle that we discuss in detail here).