Friday, March 7th 2025

AMD Questions Reported/Predicted Elevation of Radeon RX 9070 Series MSRPs
Yesterday's global launch of Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 was a relatively successful affair; day one stock was swiftly snapped up. Naturally, buying conditions were not ideal for every customer. Despite a prominent UK retailer's teasing of plentiful supply (pre-launch), online feedback pointed to apparent limited supplies of RDNA 4 cards across European regions. Fresh reports suggest that anticipated fluid price conditions have caused a larger than expected rush at retail; hence the rapid depletion of opening day stock. As reported yesterday, a handful of PC hardware stores have alluded to forthcoming upward shifts in pricing for the lower-end of an all-board partner-built Radeon RX 9070 series graphics card lineup. VideoCardz has highlighted a disgruntled customer's experience with Ebuyer UK. Bran180s—a Radeon subreddit member—managed to snag a baseline MSRP conformant Sapphire PULSE RX 9070 XT model for the ideal launch price (£569.99, including VAT), but the webstore reneged this transaction.
A screenshot was uploaded to Reddit, alongside a short story: "was on the website ready for the launch of the RX 9070 XT, got one straight away and paid no issues. Ebuyer emailed me today to cancel, and now the price is £150 more." The British e-tailer has issued apologies, following the absorption of online criticism (see relevant screenshot below). The "normal price" of Sapphire's basic Pulse card was eventually adjusted to a mere £664.98, but Ebuyer has de-listed this SKU (at the time of writing). Other UK webshops—Scan, AWD-IT, CCL, Box etc.—have similarly implemented price hikes across low, mid and premium card tiers. Australia's Hardware Unboxed managed to extract an official response from AMD—their social media post quoted Frank Azor. The Team Red exec indicated that his team is ready to intervene: "it is inaccurate that $549/$599 MSRP is launch-only pricing. We expect cards to be available from multiple vendors at $549/$599 (excluding region specific tariffs and/or taxes) based on the work we have done with our AIB partners, and more are coming. At the same time, the AIBs have different premium configurations at higher price points and those will also continue."
Sources:
Radeon Subreddit, HardwareUnboxed Tweet, VideoCardz
A screenshot was uploaded to Reddit, alongside a short story: "was on the website ready for the launch of the RX 9070 XT, got one straight away and paid no issues. Ebuyer emailed me today to cancel, and now the price is £150 more." The British e-tailer has issued apologies, following the absorption of online criticism (see relevant screenshot below). The "normal price" of Sapphire's basic Pulse card was eventually adjusted to a mere £664.98, but Ebuyer has de-listed this SKU (at the time of writing). Other UK webshops—Scan, AWD-IT, CCL, Box etc.—have similarly implemented price hikes across low, mid and premium card tiers. Australia's Hardware Unboxed managed to extract an official response from AMD—their social media post quoted Frank Azor. The Team Red exec indicated that his team is ready to intervene: "it is inaccurate that $549/$599 MSRP is launch-only pricing. We expect cards to be available from multiple vendors at $549/$599 (excluding region specific tariffs and/or taxes) based on the work we have done with our AIB partners, and more are coming. At the same time, the AIBs have different premium configurations at higher price points and those will also continue."
36 Comments on AMD Questions Reported/Predicted Elevation of Radeon RX 9070 Series MSRPs
Gonna do anything about it ?
Notta chance in hades, as the etailers would probably ignore any comments that AMD may have, and short of an outright intervention, they have absolutely zero incentive(s) to sell them at the so-called "MSRP" which is now merely a myth in most places :(
Believing the bullshit from retailers with stock to sell...
Had they their own cards, AIBs wouldn't manage to raise their prices THAT MUCH, relative to MSRP (barring extraordinary circumstances) because they wouldn't "be able to get away with it", with prospective buyers opting for AMD's card, over AIBs.
Since there's no AMD own cards, AIBs can compete JUST among themselves, instead of ALSO against AMD.
Reviewers should be confirming with their rep's if its a proper MSRP or a rebate offer, if its the latter or the rep's say "no comment" then there should be a refusal to disclose any claimed MSRP, dont give them that false advertising.
MSRP doesn't exist since 2020.
On a side note, I feel like a lot of this is happening because the role of the GPU has expanded to much more than gaming. AI, crypto, video encoding/decoding, rendering, etc. are probably most at fault for making GPUs so much more susceptible to bad retail/AIB/manufacturer behavior due to the popularity of these tasks. I feel it is time to start splitting out some of the functionality to accelerator cards like in the old days. This could be solved better by making GPUs socketable like CPUs. This requires just a reimagining of the motherboard: two sockets with their own pools of RAM. Then we just buy a pinned up GPU with no cooler offered directly from the GPU manufacturer. Cooling solutions would be bought separately.
Just imagine an X3D CPU coming in a PCB with soldered RAM and cooler sold by an AIB. The prices would be ridiculously out of control. By decoupling the cooler, RAM and PCB, you remove a lot (not all) of these shady shenanigans by offering a socketable bare GPU.
This is even worse than that where there are literally no MSRP models, but specific models that were sold at MSRP on launch day as a promo-price. Best Buy even put a count-down timer on their page for that sku saying "deal ends in 16 hours" with the price of that 9070XT going up $130 after that. Of course, there was only inventory for about 10 seconds, but the counter remained through the day. AMD saying it wasn't launch-day pricing is a flat-out lie.
When people are paying 879€ for a rx9070xt than the price was too low in the first place. Or the supply of cards was too low. It seems even 1000€ per card was sold.
Have fun comparing that list - prices and product names are an universal language. It does not matter it's a german based site:
www.computerbase.de/news/grafikkarten/verfuegbarkeit-und-preise-hier-gibt-es-amd-radeon-rx-9070-xt-und-rx-9070-zu-kaufen.91631/
Nvidia and Apple are taking up most of the wafer orders, so that leaves limited wafers for everyone else, so this whole pricing thing won't go away until more fabs are built and that takes hundreds of billions of $
AMD & Nvidia need AIBs, it makes things less expensive for everyone, even if it don't seem like it now, they need competition between them all to keep prices in check.
It's the same reason why AMD don't make motherboards, and need AIB, it's so much more expensive if they did it all themselves
AIBs don't really control what resellers sell the items for either, that is up to them while on paper it sounds good, in practice, it would be a nightmare of compatibility, and performance would greatly suffer
the socket type would basically have to change every major iteration of the GPU, and then we have the RAM changes and the power delivery circuitry and the list goes on and on
It's nothing like CPUs, where they can live on the same socket for quite some time (assuming the rest of the motherboard is compatible as well, like there are some mobos out there that even if it did have the correct socket, the power delivery options those have would throttle down the CPU if it even worked at all)
there was an attempt to do this on laptops with the MXM socketed GPUs, but that is still basically a custom motherboard that you can only do so much before you run into severe limitations
Not great but considering all, not bad either. Still a bit too much and not much different from what 7900XTX is selling for.
The price difference should have been much bigger.
In my country the 9070 are selling for the same price as 4070 Super and 9070 XT = 4070 Ti Super (we still have plenty of rtx4000 stocks left), not sure the 10% higher perf on the 9070/XT are worth it considering DLSS4 is still superior and more widely available than FSR4
Know what I'm sayin'? YES? Cool. Welcome to the real real, world. It is a very sad, unfortunate, place where marketing has completely saturated many peoples' perception of reality. I really am doing my best over here to quell it!
But it's tough, man. How do you fight the marketing disguised as facts and/or entertaining (which should not be equally respected, but often are) opinions some hold so dear?
How to not appear simply batting for the opposite team in any given situation (to those that are brainwashed and/or paid and/or reliant for other reasons on that adversarial actual brand loyalty)?
It is extremely difficult. Breaking this cycle, once they have transpired, takes nothing short of an act of god (or in the case of Intel, severe internal meltdown). Even the current Blackwell issues have minimal effect.
They should, but they don't. That is how bad it is. In many different ways both scrupulous and unscrupulous.
All you can do is call it like you see it, try to teach the new generation to not fall into the trap many have; to think for themselves; search for and understand the actual truth the best they can.
Most don't want to as that requires more effort than being fed things through their entertainment, which is actually often disguised marketing, which effects their understanding more than most even know.
Point is: I feel your pain. Just know I see it too, and you are not alone. IMO, I feel supply/demand has been perfected to a degree to maximize margin for parters, and this may be what you are trying to imply.
It allows maximum profit from AIBs/retailers that feed off attrition/availability. OTOH though, it does allow for less older product to stay on the market (which makes sense but bad for deal hunters).
I personally believe nVIDIA heavily contributes to this trend, while AMD does generally does not (to as large of a degree).
(Yet; hopefully ever; but they have changed some of their tactics to be more like nVIDIA over the years so you never know). If that changes, I will call them on it as well, and in some ways will do exactly that.
I do think part of delaying these parts was to starve the market, but I don't feel supply (as much as they can help it) will be constrained on the level nVIDIA has chosen to go about it.
This is why, at least in the current situation, people should be thoughtful of where they place blame. AMD clearly spent a lot of time (and even delayed the products) to work out rebates/whatever to keep the prices low. If retailers and AIBs set awful premiums to capitalize on the situation, which is largely due to lack of competition in a similar price bracket due to what nVIDIA does, I do not feel that is their fault given I don't think AMD is charging more for the chips, nor do I feel they are withholding supply. That's just my view of things currently, and the truth may not be quite as clear as it develops. I don't think this is an unfair question, but obviously you could understand why they don't. For nVIDIA, it's about everyone making as much money as possible. For AMD, to keep their partners happy.
I do feel something like this would greatly help AMD, but they also have to have cards across the stack desirable-enough to make it work. I think they are *trying* with this launch, to the best of their ability.
Nullify the incentive. A progressive tax to be applied to anything over MSRP so scalpers / retailers / opportunists progressively loose money.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0kr2kdv181o
www.theguardian.com/society/2024/nov/25/labour-poised-announce-ratify-100m-gambling-levy-addiction-charity