The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT release date isn’t until tomorrow, March 18, but that hasn’t stopped it falling into the hands of scalpers. At least one of which has already put the new graphics card on sale for several times is MSRP.
As spotted by TweakTown, a listing on the Czech second-hand site Bazoš put a partner model — the PowerColor Radeon RX 6700 XT Hellhound — up for an eyewatering $1,250. That’s quite a markup on the official price of $479, so anyone who hasn’t been able to find where to buy the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and was hoping for the RX 6700 XT as a more readily available alternative: you should probably prepare for another rough launch.
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The listing is accompanied by a photo showing a veritable box fort of Powercolor-branded RX 6700 XT models, though it’s not clear if this was taken by the seller themselves as the text claims to only have one in possession. In any case, the fact that scalpers are repeatedly getting their hands on new GPUs prior to release underlines just how dire the worldwide graphics card shortage has become.
It was only last month that the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, an ostensibly $329 card, felt the sting of pre-launch price gouging. And in January, the similarly in-demand PS5 was getting snapped up by resellers before restock inventory even officially went on sale.
It’s also telling that the Bazoš listing is written as a pitch to digital currency miners specifically. Booming demand for currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum has been another drain on limited GPU stock, as prospective miners buy up cards to build mining rigs.
The RX 6700 XT seems unlikely to escape this fate and attempts to mitigate miner demand haven’t exactly gone smoothly. Earlier this week, it was discovered that bypassing the RTX 3060’s mining speed limiter was possible by simply installing Nvidia’s own beta drivers.
To conclude, the GPU market is a miserable place right now. We don’t know if the Radeon RX 6700 XT launch will make things any better, but if it’s already getting a thorough scalping, the stock availability prospects doesn’t look good.
