Facing harsh reviews from both gamers and cryptocurrency miners, AMD’s Radeon RX 6500 XT may end up being the rare PC graphics card that’s actually in stock.
Case in point: Several models of the Radeon RX 6500 XT are up for sale on Newegg, a week after the initial launch. But amazingly, no one seems to be buying them, as PCGamer first reported.
The models up for sale range from $269 to $299, which is a significant bump up from the original $199 starting price for the 6500 XT. Nevertheless, it’s extremely rare to see so many GPUs in stock when other, more expensive graphics cards continue to sell out in seconds.
In addition, Newegg isn’t even bothering trying to sell the 6500 XT units through its lottery system, the Newegg Shuffle, which continues to mainly sell Nvidia’s RTX 3000 GPUs.
We suspect the flood of negative to mediocre reviews for the Radeon RX 6500 XT may have turned consumers off. Our own tests found that the GPU sometimes failed to outperform Nvidia’s GTX 1650 Super, a $159 GPU launched over two years ago.
Another drawback: The Radeon RX 6500 XT only contains 4GB of video memory, making the card incapable of mining the virtual currency Ethereum. AMD says this was a deliberate effort to prevent cryptocurrency miners from buying the graphics card. But on the downside, the company nerfed its own hardware.
In addition, consumers may be holding out for Nvidia's RTX 3050, which launches tomorrow with a starting price of $249. The card bumps up the video memory to 8GB, and generally outperforms the 6500 XT, although not always by as much as we had hoped.
Hence, there’s little reason to buy the Radeon RX 6500 XT, given the alternatives. But if you’re desperate to get your hands on a GPU, AMD's 6500 XT still offers some good performance when it comes to 1080p gaming.