AMD’s Radeon RX 6900XT LC hits the Indian market for an eyewatering US$3000

AMD announced earlier that it’d be shipping limited quantities of the liquid-cooled RX 6900XT to system integrators. In India, however, it appears that online resellers have gotten hold of a couple of units which are now being sold at truly eye-popping pricepoints. 

One Radeon RX 6900 XT was listed on PrimeABGB - an online Indian hardware retailer - for Rs. 223,000, roughly US$3000. Despite the current GPU shortage and immense price markups on popular cards like the GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3090, it’s difficult to understand exactly who this particular card is meant for, at least at this price-point. 

The vanilla, air-cooled RX 6900 XT is no slouch, slotting in between the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 in most raster workloads while delivering competent ray-tracing performance, albeit without a DLSS alternative on tap. The liquid-cooled variant hits higher clocks and, in best-case scenarios may deliver 10 percent higher performance than the air-cooled 6900XT model.

This’d mean raster performance that’s a lot closer to the RTX 3090, or slightly better in certain cases. At US$3000, though, a 300 percent markup over the standard air-cooled variety, the 6900 XT just doesn’t make much sense, even in today’s scalper-dominated market.