Radeon RX 7000 vs RTX 40 price battle could see AMD wipe the floor with Nvidia as RDNA 3 boards are allegedly much cheaper to make

Nvidia took the wraps off the RTX 40 “Lovelace” GPUs yesterday. The company announced three boards: the RTX 4090, the RTX 4080 with 16 GB of GDDR6X, and the RTX 4080 with 12 GB of GDDR6X. Some users were taken aback by the prices of the new GPUs. In his latest video, Tom from Moore’s Law is Dead analyzes the specifications and prices of the RTX 40 cards while also alleging some surprising details about AMD’s upcoming RDNA 3-based RX 7000 cards.

According to Tom, the RTX 40 prices aren’t only a reflection of the company’s greed but are also the result of the increased cost of production of Lovelace boards. The leaker thinks that Nvidia designed the Lovelace cards for a post-pandemic market where the GPU supply was severely constricted and users were gobbling up whatever they could find. So, the company didn’t put too much care into designing cost-effective boards. This is where AMD’s RX 7000 series GPUs come in.

Per the leaker, while still being more expensive to produce than the RDNA 2 cards, the RDNA 3 graphics cards cost a lot less to make than the RTX 4000 GPUs. One of Tom’s sources reported that a Navi 31 card, possibly the RX 7900 XT, “will cost more to produce than a Navi 21 card, but not much more”. The source further alleged that, since AMD won’t be using cutting-edge cooling for the reference model, most of the price difference between the Navi 21 (RX 6900 XT) and the Navi 31 GPUs comes down to RAM.

Furthermore, an AIB source explained that they are more excited about new AMD GPUs than ever before as the company’s BOMs (bill of materials) is expected to allow the AIB to profit with AMD cards at MSRP “much more easily than Nvidia”.

Moving on to the power consumption side of things, one of MLID’s sources reported that AMD is thinking about launching a “very highly overclockable” GPU. But Team Red apparently doesn’t want to go ham with power consumption until Gen 5 PCIe support for PSUs catches up. That said, AMD is not the only one worried about insane power draw.

One informant opined to the leaker that Nvidia is “legitimately worried about breaking power supplies” if the company pushed out an OC RTX 40 GPU this year since the RTX 4090 already guzzles up to 600 W. Team Green is also supposedly going to keep the RTX 4090 Ti/Titan under covers until the RX 7900 XT’s true potential becomes apparent.

As always, the information presented here is not confirmed and you shouldn’t take it as such. On November 3, we’ll finally know what AMD RDNA 3 brings to the table. Until then, RDNA 3’s power consumption and the RX 7000 series' pricing details are up in the air.

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