Alleged leaked prices for AMD Navi graphics cards are shockingly high

According to a report, a representative from Sapphire Technology, which is one of AMD’s Global Add-In-Board (AIB) Partners, has been spilling the beans about the expected prices for two of the forthcoming Navi SKUs – and the news is not good for those that were hoping for amazing price-performance ratios from the red team.

The Sapphire rep claims that the Navi “Pro” variant that will compete against Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card (possibly the Radeon RX 3070) is going to cost US$399 while the Navi “XT” model (Radeon RX 3080), which will go up against the GeForce RTX 2070, is going to have a price tag of US$499. Of course, these are just rumors and could be incorrect, or they could even be deliberate misdirection.

The prices are very surprising as many expected AMD’s Navi-based lineup to be much cheaper than Nvidia’s Turing-based offerings. But the prices mentioned above are actually more in line with products from the green team: For instance, even a quick browse on Nvidia’s online store throws up Gigabyte and MSI variants of the GeForce RTX 2070 for US$479.99 and there are several models of the GeForce RTX 2060 for US$349.99. Go to a third-party retailer and you can find even lower prices.

Some have optimistically said that “USD” in the report from VideoCardz actually refers to Singaporean dollars (SGD). This would put the prices at ~US$289 and ~US$362, respectively, which is closer to what was previously expected from AMD, but there is little valid reason to back up this particular assumption as "USD" clearly refers to the United States Dollar. Those who have been waiting to snap up a Navi-based graphics card better hope the Sapphire rep got his numbers wrong.