Shortage Disaster: AMD RX 6800 & 6800 XTs Out of Stock Everywhere

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Another great shortage in 2020

Radeon RX 6800
(Image credit: AMD)

If you had hopes of getting a shiny new RDNA 2 graphics card from AMD this upcoming Black Friday, you'll likely be very disappointed. Even though AMD's launch for third-party custom Radeon RX 6000 graphics cards officially occurred today, every single tech store has sold out its entire stock in both aftermarket and reference flavors. That isn't surprising, as some retailers didn't even have stock to begin with. 

Both graphics card manufacturers and some stores have gone to Twitter to share the problems with the RX 6000 series volume. Simply put, just like the Ampere shortages, AMD and its partners are unable to manufacturer enough graphics cards to meet demand.

Most of the recent product launches have been plagued by bots, but that doesn't seem to be the cause of the shortage this time around. In fact, Microcenter says it had zero cards for the launch today. 

If stores order, say, 50,000 units, they are lucky to get a few hundred on shelves in time for the holiday season. Suffice it to say, we probably won't see major volume for the Radeon series until 2021, much like Nvidia said about its own cards.

So what should you do as a gamer? Right now is perhaps one of the worst times to build a system, so if you're a DIYer we would highly recommend you wait until next year to build a new workstation/gaming machine when stock goes back to normal and prices are not over-inflated. 

But, if you're a gamer and desperate to grab anything to get your game on, check out our Black Friday deal guides here, which can help you get together a gaming machine. If you don't mind going with entry-level graphics like an RX 5500 XT, those are still a solid option for a "gaming-capable PC."

It really is a terrible time to build a gaming computer, especially if you were considering purchasing an RX 6800 or RX 6800 XT. If you really need something to game on now, be prepared to make some sacrifices.

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Aaron Klotz
Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

25 Comments Comment from the forums
  • DZIrl
    Blame Apple!
    Reply
  • TheBeastInside
    This actually seems worst than the RTX 3000 launch...
    Who would've thunk it? 🤷‍♂️
    Reply
  • drivinfast247
    TheBeastInside said:
    This actually seems worst than the RTX 3000 launch...
    Who would've thunk it? 🤷‍♂️
    I know. Even though Nvidia sold $175 million dollars of GPUs to miners.
    Reply
  • digitalgriffin
    What a cluster f it was this morning.

    EVERY SINGLE MODEL WAS AT LEAST $150 OVER MSRP. In some cases $250 over! It was also sold out from minute 1.

    I'm starting to think there's back room deals and AMD/Warehouses are selling straight to miners also.
    Reply
  • elroy.coltof
    Jumping on the bandwagon I see, nVidia is to blame, now AMD is to blame. We all know that there is fixed production capacity. Has it occurred to anyone that the problem is neither nVidia nor AMD, but everyone being greedy demanding they must have the latest greatest GPU 'on launch day'?

    I'd have thought that the people writing these things are business savvy enough to realize planning production capacity around these peak demand moments is commercial suicide, you'd have idle factories most of the time. And if they stockpiled for it they'd have to pay for storage of huge numbers of cards driving up the price.

    Chill ... relax ... the cards will be available in due time. The only people with any reason to be miffed about this are those that had their current GPU fail on them. Since they 'have to' buy a card now.
    Reply
  • Freez52
    I planned to build my first gaming PC six months ago, scoping out all the parts & waiting for next gen GPU+CPU. Trying & trying, I never had a chance on an RTX3080/AMD RX6800 GPU or AMD5000 series CPU. So what did I do? I just bought a suped up Raptor z55a from Velocity Micro (as much as I wanted to build myself, I did not want a PC with prev gen hardware, not now). You can buy a PC from an online PC builder with next gen GPU+CPU (they seem to be well stocked from what I was told). So, that's an option, but most ppl are upgrading their PCs & it's just not necessary. So, it's a bad time for a DIY builder, but a good time to have your PC built by PC builder w/ good reputation.
    Reply
  • JarredWaltonGPU
    drivinfast247 said:
    I know. Even though Nvidia sold $175 million dollars of GPUs to miners.
    Which is about 8 percent of its total consumer GPU sales. (Based on overall 'Gaming' sales of $2.27 billion.) The problem with RTX 30-series shortages definitely aren't due to miners, though. They don't help the situation, but there was never going to be enough to go around at launch. We also don't know how many of those GPUs weren't even RTX 30-series -- that $175 million might have been largely 20-series parts when Ethereum and BTC prices started going up.
    Reply
  • mac_angel
    didn't one of the big-wigs in AMD tweet about being happy to take someone's money when they bet that AMD would have a supply issue, just like NVidia?
    Reply
  • JarredWaltonGPU
    mac_angel said:
    didn't one of the big-wigs in AMD tweet about being happy to take someone's money when they bet that AMD would have a supply issue, just like NVidia?
    It was about whether Big Navi would be a "paper launch" or not. Which is basically up to your interpretation of what constitutes a paper launch. Obviously the cards all sold out, and that was always going to happen I think. What I really want to know is how many cards were even shipped prior to the launch. Considering some retail outlets said they got ZERO 6800 series cards, that's pretty damning.

    As I've said elsewhere, though, which would you do as AMD?
    Make 13 Zen 3 compute die, which could go into either six Ryzen 9 chips and one Ryzen 5/7 chip (sales = $3600 minimum, $5200 maximum)
    Make 2 Navi 21 chips (sales = $1160 minimum, $1300 maximum)Now consider that for the graphics cards, probably $600 goes to other components (memory, PCB, VRM, etc.) while for the CPUs the only major cost is the die and packaging (maybe $300). It would be bad business if you're wafer constrained to make lots of GPUs when the CPUs make four to five times as much money.
    Reply
  • mac_angel
    JarredWaltonGPU said:
    It was about whether Big Navi would be a "paper launch" or not. Which is basically up to your interpretation of what constitutes a paper launch. Obviously the cards all sold out, and that was always going to happen I think. What I really want to know is how many cards were even shipped prior to the launch. Considering some retail outlets said they got ZERO 6800 series cards, that's pretty damning.

    As I've said elsewhere, though, which would you do as AMD?
    Make 13 Zen 3 compute die, which could go into either six Ryzen 9 chips and one Ryzen 5/7 chip (sales = $3600 minimum, $5200 maximum)
    Make 2 Navi 21 chips (sales = $1160 minimum, $1300 maximum)Now consider that for the graphics cards, probably $600 goes to other components (memory, PCB, VRM, etc.) while for the CPUs the only major cost is the die and packaging (maybe $300). It would be bad business if you're wafer constrained to make lots of GPUs when the CPUs make four to five times as much money.

    I'm sure you know WAY more about the cost ratio than I do. I knew it was going to be a supply issue, not just for Big Navi, but all chips. I can't remember specifically (I used to be an IT Tech at an IBM Research and Development lab, but now a lot of health issues, on permanent disability, 25+ pills a day, my memory and timeline kinda suck), but I think a couple of things happened before the pandemic pretty much shut down the world, and I remember telling my friends that certain places in the tech industry would feel it several months away. The Covid-19 thing just made it worse.
    My personal opinions; one, I'm a fan of NVidia, but they have been messing up a LOT lately. Hubris, in my mind, especially when it came to trying to get the chips done at TSMC. But I also believe they should have kept with the idea of add in cards (PhysX). Not just for PhysX, though their PhysX has always been better than other options, including Havok. But they could have used it for their proprietary stuff as well. HairWorks, TurfWorks, etc. I would rather that they have made those things open source, proprietary just hurts the customers. But they also could have set that up easily for an add in card for Ray Tracing. These add-in cards would mostly just be compute cards, so it's not like they'd need a lot of power, cooling, or RAM. Again, I maybe talking about something I don't know - I know more hardware than software. But with the way NVidia Control Panel seems to work, and being able to select CUDA cores/cards when you have multiple cards, and still select options for PhysX, then I think it shouldn't be that hard to direct stuff like HairWorks, TurfWorks, etc, to the PhysX card. That also seems like it would have been a good option for when the Crypto mining crapped out on them and they had all the extra stock of mid-tier cards. Throw a bit of development into the drivers and PhysX options again for those things, and remarket all those extra cards they got shipped back.
    Reply