AMD RX 6800-series stock 'extremely limited' at launch today

AMD RX 6800 XT graphics card at various angles
(Image credit: AMD)

US retailer, Microcenter, has decided to limit all AMD Radeon RX 6800-series graphics card sales to in-store only, with no online sales being available due to the high demand. The retailer has also stated in a forum post (via Videocardz) that stock "will be extremely limited at launch" though it is expecting additional shipments at stores throughout the day.

Black Friday deals

Black Friday deals

Black Friday 2020 deals: the place to go for the all the best Black Friday bargains.

The AMD RX 6800-series graphics cards are launching today, going on sale at 9am Eastern (6am Pacfic, 2pm UK ), and will likely be sold out by five minutes past 9. Even so, if you're after one of the new Big Navi GPUs, we'll be scouring the net to find the best places to buy an RX 6800/XT card

It is worth noting that retailers and manufacturers across the globe are already out there trying to temper expectations after the Nvidia RTX 30-series launches, AMD Ryzen CPU release, and next-gen console orders, were blink-and-you'll-miss-it affairs. 

An Asus Nordic representative reportedly warned there would be low stock levels of the RX 6800, and especially the RX 6800 XT, on the day of release, with them likely "to be gone in a few minutes." All this despite AMD's Frank Azor trying to remain bullish in his Twitter assertions that it wouldn't be like the Ampere graphics card launches at all.

It's potentially looking a little healthier in the UK, however, with Overclockers having stated in its own forum that it would have more than 35 units of each model ready to roll. Though if that's 35 unit of the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT those 70 cards are going to vanish pretty swiftly, but if it is more than 35 of each manufacturer's reference cards (Sapphire, Asus, MSI, etc.) then that's a fair chunk of new GPUs.

(Image credit: r/Amd)

Still, the fact that Microcenter is limiting all Radeon sales to in-store only means that we're getting some old-school images popping up on r/Amd showing people actually queuing up outside shut stores. Which would be fine in any other, non-pandemic times but just feels a little uncomfortable right now.

Though I am in the UK where we're not really allowed outside at the moment, so maybe I'm just jealous.

Dave James
Editor-in-Chief, Hardware

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.

Latest in Graphics Cards
A Colorful RTX 5080 and its box
Three lucky folks in India can win the dubious honour of buying an RTX 5080 GPU at Nvidia MSRP
Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks while holding the company's new GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards and a Thor Blackwell robotics processor during the 2025 CES event in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, on Monday, Jan. 6, 2025. Huang announced a raft of new chips, software and services, aiming to stay at the forefront of artificial intelligence computing. Photographer: Bridget Bennett/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Group allegedly trying to smuggle Nvidia Blackwell chips stare down bail set at over $1 million
Nvidia RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics card on different backgrounds
AI will be crammed in more of the graphics pipeline as Nvidia and Microsoft are bringing AI shading to a DirectX preview next month
Nvidia RTX 50-series graphics cards alongside an RTX 4090
Nvidia says it's sold twice as many RTX 50-series cards as RTX 40-series in the first 5 weeks. I'd bloody well hope so given there was essentially just the RTX 4090 for competition
AMD Radeon RX 9070/9070 XT graphics cards with artistic renders of reference design cards circled
Looks like a reference design AMD RX 9070 XT card has shown up in China, but let's not get carried away with thoughts of MBA cards just yet
AMD Radeon Sapphire Pure RX 9070 XT graphics card for PC gaming in white colourway
Ranking AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics cards by their visual design, cuz, you know, I can't buy one for MSRP so have to kill my time somehow
Latest in News
A photo of an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K processor surrounded by DDR5 memory sticks from Corsair, Kingston, and Lexar
Fresh leak suggests Intel's on-again-off-again Arrow Lake CPU refresh is back on the menu (boys)
A Colorful RTX 5080 and its box
Three lucky folks in India can win the dubious honour of buying an RTX 5080 GPU at Nvidia MSRP
The Facebook 'Like' emoji logo is seen in this photo illustration on 22 August, 2023 in Warsaw, Poland. (Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Get ready to argue with your weird Uncle on Facebook again. Meta is rolling out its new fact checking solution to it's 190 million users in the United States
Gabe Newell in a Valve promotional video, on a yacht.
Go ahead and complain the discounts aren't as steep as they used to be, but Steam just had its biggest year ever for seasonal sales
Valve Steam Deck OLED handheld PC
'The future of hardware at Valve is bright': Valve celebrates the success of Steam Deck and Steam OS
Key art of the videogame Lunacid, showing a pale, long haired knight in purple armor contemplating a purple, flaming sword surrounded by the different phases of the moon.
One of my favorite indie RPGs is getting a follow-up made with FromSoftware's 25-year-old Super Mario Maker for first person dungeon crawlers