Wednesday, March 22nd 2023
Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 XT Pulse Slides Down to $800 Following TechPowerUp Review
Days following its TechPowerUp review where we noted its rather high $860 street price compared to several other custom-design RX 7900 XT graphics cards in the market, the Radeon RX 7900 XT Pulse by Sapphire, has seen a price correction. The card is now listed at $820 on American online retailer Newegg, with a -$20 coupon bringing it down to $800. At this price, the RX 7900 XT Pulse matches other cost-effective custom designs, such as the ASRock RX 7900 XT Phantom Gaming, and XFX RX 7900 XT Speedster Merc 310. Most premium custom-design RX 7900 XT cards have settled around the $850-mark. These include the ASRock RX 7900 XT Taichi, MSI RX 7900 XT Gaming Trio Classic, and the PowerColor RX 7900 XT Hellhound OC.
There are still a few cards that are either at the launch MSRP of $900 or beyond. These include the ASUS TUF Gaming RX 7900 XT OC, Sapphire RX 7900 XT NITRO+, and the PowerColor RX 7900 XT Red Devil OC. The ideal price for the RX 7900 XT is exactly where the market is driving it to (at or under $800), as it is under pressure from the RTX 4070 Ti. Some of the priciest RX 7900 XT cards comically overlap with the prices of the cheapest RX 7900 XTX.
There are still a few cards that are either at the launch MSRP of $900 or beyond. These include the ASUS TUF Gaming RX 7900 XT OC, Sapphire RX 7900 XT NITRO+, and the PowerColor RX 7900 XT Red Devil OC. The ideal price for the RX 7900 XT is exactly where the market is driving it to (at or under $800), as it is under pressure from the RTX 4070 Ti. Some of the priciest RX 7900 XT cards comically overlap with the prices of the cheapest RX 7900 XTX.
10 Comments on Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 XT Pulse Slides Down to $800 Following TechPowerUp Review
There's never any valid reason for a lower-tier product to have worse performance/$ than a higher-tier part these days.
All this fixes is the broken hierarchy where the lower-tier product is finally better value than the flagship again (barely, but at least it's not actually wrong anymore). However, Every 40-series from Nvidia and 70-series from AMD has been objectively bad value. Not just bad value because the performance/$ is always poor at the highest tiers, but also bad value compared to the higher-tier cards from last generation. 4070Ti and 7900XT aren't doing well against clearance of old stock - Newegg was selling 3080 FE cards new for $420 a couple of weeks back. You've also been able to pick up brand new 6900XT cards for sub-$600 for a long time now.
I'm all about the price/performance "sweet spot" with hardware and nothing has launched this generation that satisfies that. As I said in the original Pulse 7900XT review, I picked up a 6800XT for significantly less than half the price of a 7900XT and it's only ~25% slower than the 7900XT/4070Ti in most games. I'm playing at 1440p120 most of the time and you just don't need a lot more than that. It's also not much of an image quality upgrade to go from 1440p to 4K. Sure, there's a bit of sharpness gain, but even with a 7900XT/4070Ti you'll probably still need to use FSR/DLSS to hit 4K120 which means you're losing that sharpness just about everywhere except the HUD and UI when things are in motion.
:roll:
Cause they know there will almost always be a certain number of (under-educated) schmucks out there that will buy them, regardless, hehehehe :D