In a surprising turn of events, AMD is reportedly selling reference-designed Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs and CPUs for MSRP at Pax East, according to HotHardware. AMD's SKUs include the RX 6700 XT, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6900 XT Halo Infinite Edition GPUs, plus the newly released Ryzen 7 5800X3D. All these products are being sold at MSRP, so it is a great place to grab one if you can make it to Pax East.
This surprise appears to be another sign of supply and demand returning to normal for the GPU market. Currently, AMD's own store is out of stock of all these products. However, if AMD had enough volume to sell GPUs and the 5800X3D at Pax East, it's a possibility we could see graphics cards coming back in stock at its direct buy store sometime soon.
This would be nice, considering none of AMD's AIB partner cards are available at MSRP at the current moment. On Newegg.com, RX 6900 XT's are averaging $1100 -- just $100 over MSRP, while RX 6800 XTs are around the $850-$950 mark for the cheapest models (which is $200-$300 over MSRP).
RX 6800's are faring even worse, with prices similar to the RX 6800 XT's, at around $800-$900 for the cheapest models, which is a $220 -$320 price hike over MSRP.
However, good news returns with the RX 6700 XT, which has the closest-to-MSRP prices of all the cards. AIB partner cards are selling for $570-$600 at the cheapest level, which is only a $91-$121 price hike over MSRP.
Overall, we can expect prices to continue to decline, especially for AMD cards, with prices of RX 6000 series GPUs being closer to MSRP than Nvidia's RTX 30 series counterparts for the current time (with the exception of the RTX 3050). In our overview of GPU pricing for April, we saw a 10% drop in GPU prices overall, and that trend has been consistent over the past few months.
We have also seen AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X3D doing incredibly well in the market, with the CPU going out of stock almost instantly upon launch. This still remains true, as Newegg.com still has no supply of 5800X3D's at its default price. To counter the supply issue, 5800X3D's are going for $100-$150 over MSRP right now on Amazon and 3rd party sellers on Newegg.com.
If GPU prices continue their downward trend, we should see GPUs at MSRP by Q4 2022. But this change could happen even sooner depending on market forces.
