French outlet, Cowcotland, is claiming its 'network' has divulged privileged information about the imminent AMD RX 6700 XT release date. The new mainstream midi Navi graphics card is reportedly going to go on sale on March 18 this year, but as we've all come to expect from hardware launches in these dark times, supply will be super limited.
Like, real limited. Like, 'we don't know when we're even going to receive launch day stock' limited. Cowcotland reports it specifically as "we have already been told that the quantities will be more than very limited."
It looks like it's going to be rather tough to call this one anything but a paper launch if such rumours turn out to be true. Though I'm sure if the likes of Frank Azor can find a way to buy one simply by clicking refresh a few times on the AMD.com store pages, then the rest of us will be able to bag a shiny new Radeon RX 6700 XT GPU if we want it bad enough.
It does bear saying that anything which comes attributed to the ephemeral notion of a media outlet's 'network' of insiders has to be treated with caution. The rumour likely stems from a contact within one of AMD's graphics card partners, with not all regions, and not all partners, treated to the same stock levels.
So, while the supply for one partner in one region might be "more than very limited" that doesn't necessarily mean that the entire supply for AMD's new mainstream GPU will be. This is the high-volume end of the graphics card market, which means you've got to hope for AMD's sake that it can get decent supply out there because we know there is demand.
But, given the way launches of the last six months have dried up within minutes, I'm not holding out a lot of hope that things are going to be vastly different.
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The AMD RX 6700 XT, and its wee sibling, the RX 6700, are the next graphics cards to come out of the Radeon stables and are expected to house the AMD Navi 22 GPU. The top chip will arrive with the same 40 CU configuration as its RX 5700 XT forebear, but is being designed to take on the imminent Nvidia RTX 3060, with both sporting some 12GB VRAM.
The lower-caste RX 6700, however, is likely to ship with 36 CUs and 6GB of GDDR6 memory, if the recent PowerColor RX 6700 EEC listings are to be believed.
We're expecting pricing to be around the $400 and $350 mark respectively for the two RX 6700-series cards, but it might all depend on how close, or even how far ahead of the RTX 3060 cards the new AMD GPUs get.
