Here's where you can buy an AMD RX 6700 XT
Set your watches for 9am ET / 1pm GMT
AMD's Radeon RX 6700 XT may not be the best value 1440p graphics card there's ever been, but when its nearest Nvidia competition are both utterly sold out due to the ongoing graphics card shortage, you might be thinking it's worth picking one up anyway. All things being equal, I'd probably urge you to wait until either the cheaper RTX 3060 Ti or similarly-priced RTX 3070 come back in stock, but if you're determined to get yourself a new graphics card right this second, then I've gathered together all the places where you can buy an RX 6700 XT when it goes on sale later today at 9am ET / 1pm GMT.
AMD RX 6700 XT: What you need to know
What is it? AMD's ultimate 1440p graphics card
When is it coming out? March 18th
How much is it? $479
Where to buy an RX 6700 XT:
The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT launches worldwide on March 18th (that's today) at 9am ET / 1pm GMT, and prices are meant to start at $479 in the US. Whether we'll see anyone selling cards at that price remains to be seen, however. At time of writing, most retailers haven't put their holding pages live yet, and the ongoing hardware stock shortages will no doubt push prices up higher than normal pretty fast. For now, I've linked to retailers' general AMD GPU pages, but I will update this page with more specific RX 6700 XT links as soon as they're available.
As I said above, the RX 6700 XT is already quite expensive for what it is, and so be careful about how much you spend if you're planning on buying one today. Remember, the considerably more powerful RX 6800 is meant to start at £529 / $579, so make sure you don't pay over the odds for a slower card.
Where to buy an RX 6700 XT in the UK:
Not available yet:Where to buy an RX 6700 XT in the US:
While it's highly likely Day One stock will sell out pretty fast, AMD have said there should be decent supply coming through every week if you don't manage to get one today. In a recent interview with PC World, AMD's Scott Herkelman said:
"Since this drama started happening late last year across the industry, we've been reviewing some flight plans for this product specifically, and even if you can't get it on Day One, we have good supply coming week after week after week, to be refreshed in the regions, to be refreshed on AMD.com, so it's a significant focus for us and our supply chain team and our partners, which is ensuring that that's there and it's ready for gamers to be able to try and purchase."
AMD RX 6700 XT specs
The RX 6700 XT is the fourth Big Navi card in AMD's RDNA 2 family so far, and it's AMD's big play for the 1440p arena. AMD first introduced it as a card that can play games on max settings at this resolution, and from my own testing, I can confirm that this is indeed the case. It's also able to hit frame rates well into the 90-100fps region at 1080p as well. Here's a reminder of how the RX 6700 XT's specs stack up against the rest of AMD's RX 6000 family.
| AMD RX 6700 XT | AMD RX 6800 | AMD RX 6800 XT | AMD RX 6900 XT | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Compute Units | 40 | 60 | 72 | 80 |
| Game Clock | 2424MHz | 1815MHz | 2015MHz | 2015MHz |
| Boost Clock | 2581MHz | 2105MHz | 2250MHz | 2250MHz |
| Memory | 12GB GDDR6 | 16GB GDDR6 | 16GB GDDR6 | 16GB GDDR6 |
| Infinity Cache | 96MB | 128MB | 128MB | 128MB |
| TDP | 230W | 250W | 300W | 300W |
| Starting Price | $479 | $579 | $649 | $999 |
It's a powerful GPU, to be sure, and its 12GB of GDDR6 memory is a welcome addition (especially when the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070 only come with 8GB of VRAM). While not quite as high as the 16GB of VRAM found on the rest of the RX 6000 family, 12GB still gives you more than enough headroom to take advantage of those high quality texture packs and presets at 1440p, and should last you for many years to come, too. Indeed, we're already seeing some games such as Watch Dogs Legion start to require more than 8GB of VRAM for their top Ultra settings presets, which means Nvidia's RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070 are probably going to encounter VRAM bottlenecks much more quickly than any of AMD's Rx 6000 GPUs.
It still has a relatively high TDP of 230W, however, and AMD recommend you pair it with a power supply that's rated for at least 650W. Nvidia's RTX 3070, meanwhile, has a TDP of 220W (which Nvidia also recommends pairing with a 650W power supply), while the RTX 3060 Ti has a TDP of 200W. The latter only needs a 600W power supply according to Nvidia, which can help cut down on costs if you're building a new PC from scratch.
Should I buy an AMD RX 6700 XT?
As mentioned above, there's no denying the RX 6700 XT is a powerful graphics card for 1440p gaming. It's just that it's not particularly great value compared to the starting price of its Nvidia rivals. In my benchmarks, I found that it was often only as fast as Nvidia's cheaper RTX 3060 Ti a lot of the time, and the marginally more expensive RTX 3070 was quite a way out in front in terms of overall performance.
Throw ray tracing into the mix, and the RX 6700 XT falls behind even further, if only because so many ray tracing games also support Nvidia's DLSS tech these days to help boost frame rates while AMD's rival upscaling technology, FidelityFX Super Resolution, is still nowhere to be seen. Admittedly, the number of ray tracing games is still reasonably small right now, but it is one of the major reasons why you might be thinking about upgrading to a new graphics card at the moment, and when Nvidia's cards can do it so much better, it makes it very hard to recommend any of AMD's RX 6000 GPUs as good value alternatives.
We don't know when FidelityFX Super Resolution is going to arrive either. AMD committed to "this year" in the PC World interview I mentioned earlier, but that could be December for all we know. Here's what AMD told me when I asked for an update in the run-up to the RX 6700 XT's launch:
"We continue to expand our collaborations with game developers on the development of an upscaling feature for AMD Radeon graphics cards that can be easily implemented across a broad selection of titles. We will provide more details on our AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution feature at the appropriate time."
As I said in my RX 6700 XT review, AMD's new 1440p GPU arrives at an awkward time for new graphics card buyers, as it's not just availability issues we're dealing with here, but an incomplete feature set, too. I'm hopeful that FidelityFX Super Resolution will eventually level the playing field when it comes to the RX 6000's ray tracing performance, but right now they're all very much on the back foot compared to their Nvidia rivals.