AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT reference card to cost $499?

Two days from now, AMD will officially reveal its Radeon RX 6700 XT video card. This is the first Navi 22-based video card from the firm. Chip shortages have plagued the computer industry for months now and this resulted in the delay of various hardware, including the new generation of mid-range video cards. NVIDIA rolled out its GeForce RTX 3060 last week, officially the MSRP is $329 but availability at anywhere near that price is almost non-existent.

Radeon RX 6700 XT more expensive than expected

YouTuber Moore's Law is Dead published some fresh rumors about AMD's upcoming Navi22. As always, we recommend taking this with a grain of salt. First up, the bad news is that the official MSRP of the Radeon RX 6700 XT will be a lot higher than most expected. Basically, the MSPR will more accurately reflect the true retail price.

So how high will the price go? According to Moore's Law is Dead, AMD is still conflicted about the price point. The firm is reportedly weighing its options between a $479 and $499 price tag. This will be the figure charged for the AMD-made reference card sold via the company's website.

Two SKUs of the Radeon RX 6700 XT

Next, there's a rumor that AMD has two variants of the Radeon RX 6700 XT. One SKU will be used for reference-based cards and the other one is a binned version intended for factory overclocked models. Obviously, the latter will be even more expensive than the basic version. What it all boils down to is that the bare minimum price of a custom-design Radeon RX 6700 XT card will be somewhere in the $500 range.

In terms of performance, it's rumored that the reference model will perform about the same as the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. The overclocked models should be positioned somewhere between the RTX 3060 Ti and the RTX 3070.

Exceptional yields == delay of Radeon RX 6700?

One sliver of good news is that yields of Navi 22 are said to be very good. Moore's Law is Dead claims the production is going "exceptionally well" and heard from his sources that AMD will be shipping a lot of these chips over the coming months. The YouTuber claims the delay of the Radeon RX 6700 (non-XT) is a side effect of the good yields. With most chips reportedly having very little defects, AMD doesn't want to waste good chips on lower-end SKUs.

When can I get one?

Late last week, French tech site Cowcotland reported that launch volume of the Radeon RX 6700 XT would be better than previous launches -- but still pretty bad. Availability of the Radeon RX 6700 XT is expected in the second half of March.

With the Radeon RX 6700 XT, you get a Navi 22 GPU with 2560 cores, a 192-bit memory bus and 12GB GDDR6 memory.