If you tried to buy AMD’s latest PC graphics card this morning, you might have actually pulled it off. The Radeon RX 6500 XT, launched today, starts at $199, but its low-end specs and the ensuing mediocre reviews may have diminished demand for the PC graphics card.
We saw this play out on Newegg, which began selling the 6500 XT around 9 a.m. EST. Although a few of the models seem to sell out in minutes, one of the products, the Gigabyte Gaming OC, remained up for sale for over an hour—a rare sight, given the current demand for GPUs.
At 9:30 a.m., we tried to purchase the card, and to our surprise we were able to reach the final stage of the checkout process. The card then sat in our cart for another 40 minutes before it was finally listed as sold out.
We suspect the Gigabyte model was available for so long because of its $299 cost, which is $100 more than the starting price. The other reason probably has to do with the controversial specs for the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which only features 4GB of video memory, using less memory bandwidth than the older Radeon RX 5500 XT from two years ago.
The other Radeon RX 6500 XT limitation is its support for only four PCIe 4.0 lanes, instead of 16. However, AMD said in a media roundtable at CES that the GPU was specifically designed to avoid attracting cryptocurrency miners, who prioritize GPUs with high amounts of video memory.
“We have really optimized this one to be gaming-first at that target market,” said Laura Smith, AMD’s co vice-president of Radeon graphics. “And you can see that with the way that we configured the part. Even with the four gigs of frame buffer. That’s a really nice frame buffer size for the majority of AAA games, but it’s not particularly attractive if you’re doing blockchain-type activities, or mining activities.”
In other words, AMD nerfed its own product to stop miners and scalpers from buying them all, but at the cost of offering PC gamers a less-than-ideal GPU. Since the launch, we've only noticed four listings for the 6500 XT emerge on eBay, with merchants offering the card for between $384 and $659.
Interestingly, Newegg also avoided selling the 6500 XT GPU via its lottery system, dubbed the Newegg Shuffle. We’ve reached out to the company for a comment on that decision, but it may be a sign that Newegg anticipated lower demand for the 6500 XT.
The 6500 XT GPU was also available at Micro Center stores. Best Buy seemed to only offer one model behind a membership paywall. Amazon had no product listings.