AMD's $199 RX 6500 XT doesn't look so appealing at these inflated prices
Asus is charging up to €334 for its RX 6500 XT, which is a real shame for budget gaming.
Shortly following AMD's CES 2022 product premiere, where the company announced the budget RX 6500 XT with an MSRP of $199, Asus announced two of its own RX 6500 XT models: the Dual Radeon RX 6500 XT OC Edition and TUF Gaming Radeon RX 6500 XT OC Edition. These two cards offer Asus' take on the cheapest AMD RX 6000-series graphics card, but as we've since found out, they're anything but cheap.
According to a press release, reported by hardwareluxx-de, the Asus TUF Gaming Radeon RX 6500 XT OC Edition will sit at €334. The cheaper of the two is the Dual Radeon RX 6500 XT OC Edition, which will go for €299.
Though an imperfect science, by today's EUR/USD exchange rate, this would work out to the equivalent of $377 and $338, respectively.
That's clearly far from the price set by AMD during the company's CES 2022 stream, and doesn't spark confidence to this card's lasting shelf price on arrival. Here's hoping the actual USD value isn't quite so steep.
It's not just higher-than-expected third-party prices that we have to contend with, after all. A shortage of graphics cards, largely caused by a semiconductor shortage the world over, has caused skyrocketing prices for this precious PC component. While in short supply, these GPUs are also in high demand, due to a lack of budget offerings in the current AMD and Nvidia generations until now, with the arrival of the RX 6500 XT and RTX 3050.
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AMD has mentioned that it hopes to avoid the rough waters of cryptocurrency mining by purposefully maintaining a less-than-ideal VRAM capacity of just 4GB GDDR6. How that will play out in terms of availability is yet to be seen, as the card has not arrived in earnest yet. However, the RX 6600 XT was widely available shortly after its launch, so it's certainly a possibility.
That said, we weren't totally blown away by the RX 6600 XT, and from the looks of the specs list and relative performance of the RX 6500 XT it won't appeal to us much either. We desperately want decent budget graphics cards right now, but if they aren't marginally convincing in price or performance it's going to be a tough pill to swallow.
Just one more reason why the semiconductor shortage totally sucks.