AMD’s RX 6950 XT, the rumored refresh of its flagship GPU, might come with a seriously weighty price tag if a fresh leak is anything near the right ballpark.
There are some caveats here, as you might expect – and more than normal around a pricing leak, we’ll come back to that – but on the face of it, the RX 6950 XT has seen pre-release product listings at a couple of Australian retailers, Megabuy and ITnest (as PC Gamer spotted).
The damage that the 6950 XT will supposedly do to your wallet is a hefty AU$3,240 (around $2,400, £1,800) at Megabuy – ouch indeed.
Now, note that the product listing actually says the graphics card is a ‘Gigabyte Radeon RX 6900 XT Gaming OC’, which is the existing flagship, but the product code clearly states ‘GV-R695XTGAMING-OC-16GD’, referring to a 6950 XT model.
It’s likely that someone has made a mistake typing in the full name – or used a template and not changed that bit – although of course this could indicate the entire listing is a mistake. We can’t rule that out, anyway.
However, note that there is an existing listing for the Gigabyte 6900 XT Gaming OC, product code ‘GV-R69XTGAMING OC-16GD’ – so R69, not R695 – and this is priced much lower at AU$1,949 (around $1,450, £1,100).
Furthermore, as VideoCardz picked up, Gigabyte has recently registered the GV-R695XTGAMING OC-16GD product code with the EEC (Eurasian Economic Commission), which is another tick in the box for its likely authenticity – though none of this represents anything like a cast-iron guarantee, of course.
Analysis: Performance expectations will be high if there’s anything to this leak
If true, this price tag would represent a massive leap compared to the cost of the 6900 XT – a hike of 66% on the current flagship going by the pricing observed above at Megabuy. Now obviously, we’ve got to be careful around any leak like this, as the price given could merely be a placeholder – in other words, a guess.
However, if it’s true, or close to the mark, you can be sure that the performance increase which is delivered by the 6950 XT over the current flagship will obviously be far more modest than the level of hike seen with the pricing.
Although if AMD is setting the price at around this kind of level, we should expect a good extra dollop of frame rates from this GPU refresh (remember that some really fast boost speeds are expected from the 6950 XT going by the grapevine).
It’s also worth bearing in mind that the Megabuy price for Gigabyte’s RTX 3090 Ti cards is only a few percent higher than this purported 6950 XT price tag, so the expectation would certainly be that it competes with Nvidia’s new flagship. If this pricing is correct, of course…
We shall see, and interestingly the order delivery date is pegged at 4+ weeks, which coincides roughly with the latest rumored launch date of mid-May for the RX 6950 XT (and the other two refreshes supposedly due, namely the 6750 XT and 6650 XT).
The evidence is really mounting up regarding this trio of RDNA 2 refreshes, and we’ve even been treated to pics of them – with the graphics cards being smart-looking black editions.
It seems more and more likely that this will be the next step AMD takes with its GPU launch schedule, before debuting a whole new RDNA 3 range later in 2022 (and if the 6950 XT price is high, it’ll surely be even more tempting to be patient and wait for the next-gen flagship for those who want a powerhouse card).