Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of years, you probably know that the world has been in the middle of a massive silicon microchip shortage, thanks to various factors (the COVID-19 pandemic, the automotive industry, political tensions with certain East Asian nations, climate change, the rise of crypto-currency mining. I could go on.) During this time, pretty much everything that has a chip in it had its price skyrocket as supply failed to meet increasing demand. This obviously includes computer components such as graphics cards, which hit a price peak of an average of 329% ABOVE the recommended retail price.

While it looks like the shortage is finally coming to an end, we’re not out of the woods. Yet, AMD have announced three new graphics cards to be added to their existing lineup of Radeon RX 6000 series cards: the 6650 XT, 6750 XT and 6950 XT. That’s not the interesting part, though.

Rumours have been floating around the Internet for a good while now of AMD’s new RDNA 3 chip architecture – these new cards aren’t that. They’re not even really new cards. As the nomenclature might suggest, these are just revisions of the already-existing 6600 XT, 6700 XT and 6900 XT with literally the same silicon, logic and board layout, but new firmware for faster clock speeds on both the GPU itself and the associated memory.

If you’re thinking these are going to be a big performance boost, you’d be wrong. AMD have said that there are ‘not going to be any major enhancements’ and that ‘nothing physically has changed.’ Taking a look at the figures for ourselves, we can see that the new cards do offer a slight performance bump of around 5-6%, so depending on the game you’re playing, your results may vary. There is a trade-off though; for that 5-6% performance boost, the cards have a 25-30W higher TDP than the original cards, using more power and producing more heat.

Now for the interesting part – pricing. Instead of AMD’s (and nVidia’s, they’re not off the hook for this) usual method of pricing over the last couple of years, wherein they pull seemingly random figures from thin air and slap it on a product as an MSRP, knowing full well that their customer base is going to need to give up an arm, leg and possibly kidney to purchase one, they’ve actually given recommended pricing IN-LINE with the going market rates. Under this strategy, the 6650 XT (USD$399, AU$574), 6750 XT (USD$549, AU$789) and 6950 XT (USD$1099, AU$1580) actually have pricing that is sane, reasonable and extremely competitive, which is a shocker.

It remains to be seen whether we’ll actually be able to BUY these cards from retailers at this price, but with the launch happening on the 10th of May, we shouldn’t have to wait long to find out. Goes without saying, of course, that if you would like to put one or eight of these cards on order through Tech House, please call or email one of our stores and our staff can help you out!