Tech Talk

AMD’s RDNA 3 graphics cards are about to hit the shelves, and we’ve caught the price of a couple of XFX third-party models via Amazon listings which have now been yanked down – not before they were highlighted on Twitter, though.

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 (flagged up by VideoCardz).

The 7900 XTX is AMD’s flagship for the next-gen, and going by the price tag on Amazon, XFX’s Speedster Merc version will retail at $1,100 in the US, which is a hundred bucks more than the reference board. The 7900 XT card is pitched at $979, which is $80 more than the reference model’s MSRP in the US.

As mentioned, these prices no longer appear on the respective product pages on Amazon, so someone has spotted the leaked info and stripped it out.

For the uninitiated, the reference version of a graphics card – which is the most basic incarnation of the board, built to AMD’s default spec – is always cheaper than custom variants, which have beefier clocks, and better components (plus more effective cooling), thus they’re obviously going to be pricier.

Of course they run a bit faster for the extra outlay as you’d expect, although the difference often isn’t all that much (they may be able to be pushed much further with overclocking than vanilla boards, mind you, for those enthusiasts who engage in that pursuit).

Analysis: A hint that the price might just be right (or at least not wrong)

The key point to focus on here is that the XFX Speedster Merc 310 isn’t much pricier than the reference model at 10% more (actually 9% in the case of the 7900 XT).

This very much goes against the worrying rumor which was recently aired that AMD’s custom third-party offerings of RDNA 3 cards would be much more expensive than the reference incarnations (and that they might make up the majority of stock in the early days, too).

A 10% markup seems reasonable for this XFX model, particularly considering that the Speedster Merc is a higher-end variant from 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).

Naturally, we don’t know if these prices will prove correct, so we should approach this spillage with a good deal of trepidation, as pre-release prices can be placeholders. Although Amazon is a more trustworthy source of such leakage than some of the minor European retailers that often pop up with early pricing, especially given that we are just a couple of days away from the launch of RDNA 3 graphics cards.

If this does pan out to be true, then it’ll give Nvidia even more reason to cut RTX 4080 pricing, something that’s also been rumored to be in the cards recently. Team Green may need to stay more competitive with its rival and stoke flagging RTX 4080 sales, and we’ve also touched on the possibility that dropping the asking price on the 4080 could be necessary to give room to competitively price the inbound rumored RTX 4070 Ti at its correct level (a rather tricky pricing puzzle that we discuss at length here).