Custom RX 7000 graphics cards from third-party card manufacturers are expected to launch later than reference boards and can be quite costly to launch if the latest GPU information is to be believed.
VideoCardz (opens in a new tab) reports that the Board Channels forum (in China) claims that the only RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX graphics cards that will initially arrive on AMD’s launch day (December 13) will be reference boards.
These are models built to AMD’s own reference specification, but there will also be models with more powerful configurations – higher clocks, better cooling – as usual. However, the latter third-party variants won’t debut until a week or two after reference boards have been pushed to the shelves. This would point to a late December sales start date for these custom boards (and maybe even things could be delayed until early 2023 given that very late December is a bit of an odd place timewise).
Worryingly, the Chinese source – treating all this with great caution as with any speculation – goes on to say that the custom boards could be “significantly more expensive” compared to the initial reference models.
Analysis: a difficult situation for AMD?
Such high-end custom graphics cards naturally have accelerated clocks as mentioned, and often better quality components, cooling solutions, etc. to maintain the temperatures these faster clocks can control. In short, it’s no surprise that the more powerful 7900 XT and XTX models will be more expensive, it’s totally expected.
However, what is somewhat disturbing is the way things are presented as such much more expensive, and that sounds ominous. In a similar way to how the RTX 4080 hit a very high price with some third-party variants compared to the suggested retail price, will we see the same with the new AMD RDNA 3 GPUs?
This seems to be a suggestion that would be disappointing – as we very much hope AMD will keep its RX 7900 variants relatively affordable, at least compared to Nvidia’s RTX 4080. (Remember, Team Red is not going to try and compete with the RTX 4090 and not the 4080 – this is clear from AMD’s press materials and positioning).
There’s another key element here, and that’s the kind of volume AMD and its cardmaking partners will garner during the initial launch of RDNA 3. This will obviously be critical to pricing because if inventory isn’t plentiful and it sells out quickly, well, it becomes it’s a vicious circle as cards will sell even faster as scalpers put on price caps and buy stocks to resell.
According to a Board Channels source, the supply of RDNA 3 graphics cards is initially expected to be “sufficient”, but it’s hard to make a judgment at this stage and should be taken with a few handfuls of salt.
AMD and its card makers may be in a tough spot when it comes to evaluating stock, as Nvidia has been selling expensive Lovelace GPUs for a while – most notably pushing a lot of RTX 4090 units. relative price to the 4090, this GPU was received in a much less enthusiastic way, shall we say).
Expensive graphics cards are quite a niche proposition – especially with the cost of living crisis going on, along with sky-high energy bills – so is there a danger to AMD that Nvidia has already eaten too much of this pie? Keep in mind that while the RX 7900 XT and XTX are certainly more affordable than Nvidia’s RTX 4080, they’re still expensive boards – reference or not. And perhaps this kind of thinking fuels AMD’s concerns that the company doesn’t want to go overboard with initially pushing too much RDNA 3 inventory.
This is pure speculation of course, but it could be related to the reason for wanting to delay third-party custom models to a bit later and stagger the supply to perhaps better match anticipated demand from the gateway.
Overall, it’s clear enough that AMD may have some tough decisions to make and various possible issues to balance. So it’s not inconceivable that there may be some last-minute timeframe shifting going on behind the scenes as Team Red looks at Nvidia’s Lovelace sales sheet – which is apparently around 160,000 units and counts for the RTX 4090 and 4080 – and tries to calculate best approach to startup and volume strategy.