AMD RX 7600 Could Cost More Than the RX 6650 XT

Radeon RX 7900 XT(X) power
(Image credit: AMD)

A pair of listings on PC-Canada has revealed the price of AMD's upcoming RX 7600 in Canada. One of the listings features a Sapphire Pulse RX 7600 for $451.99 CAD, and the other is $443.99 CAD for an MSI RX 7600 Mech 2x Classic. After converting to USD and factoring in any potential "early adopter tax," we end up with approximate prices of around $299 USD. That's technically less than the launch price of AMD's RX 6600, and well below the RX 6650 XT's $399 MSRP, though these days the various RX 66xx-class GPUs tend to sell far below their launch prices.

At first glance, AMD's new RDNA 3 GPU appears to be priced decently. The RX 6600 XT and RX 6650 XT for example launched at $379 and $399, respectively. Looking at the rumored RX 7600 specifications, the 7600 could have the same number of compute units (CUs) as the 6650 XT, and it uses AMD's potentially faster and better RDNA 3 architecture.

However, prices have changed drastically since release, with AMD's entire RX 6600-series lineup discounted well below the RX 6600's original MSRP of $330. Current-day prices have the RX 6600 starting at just $200, while the RX 6600 XT and RX 6650 XT can be had for around $250-$280.

At these highly discounted prices, there's no guarantee the RX 7600 will be a clear upgrade over the RX 6600-series. This is particularly true of the RX 6650 XT, which has the exact same core count as the RX 7600. Clocks, power, and other aspects will certainly factor in, but AMD's RX 7600 has its work cut out for it if it's going to deliver a better value than AMD's existing GPUs.

Part of the problem is that, unlike Nvidia's Ada Lovelace architecture, there aren't really any headlining upgrades with RDNA 3 over RDNA 2. Ray tracing performance is a bit better, the number of ALUs per CU has doubled, cache sizes have changed (doubled in some cases, shrunk in the case of the L3). But the biggest news was about AMD moving to GPU chiplets, which as far as we know isn't happening on the Navi 33 GPU that's purported to drive the RX 7600, and chiplets didn't actually do anything to improve performance — they were about saving on cost rather than improving performance, at least for this generation. We'll get a process node shrink, but even that might not mean much, as Navi 33 will likely still be on TSMC N6, based on earlier rumors, and that's just a tuned version of TSMC's N7 node.

Of course we have to wait for the launch day reviews before we'll know how good or bad the RX 7600 really is. But there's no denying that the RX 7600 is completely riding on AMD's RDNA 3 architecture to provide a legitimate performance advantage over its predecessors. This isn't confidence-inspiring, considering we have not seen any real innovations with AMD's RDNA3 architecture that makes it substantially better than RDNA 2.

By way of our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, the RX 7900 XTX outperforms the RX 6950 XT by up to 40%, which is good, but that's with a 50% wider memory interface, 50% more memory, and 160% more theoretical compute. We can only wonder for now exactly how much more performance (if any) the RX 7600 will offer over the existing RX 6650 XT.

The end of the crypto-mining boom has created a lot of problems for the GPU industry in general, coupled with inflation and other challenging macro-economic factors. The fact that AMD appears to be launching RX 7600 ahead of potential RX 7700/7800-series cards says a lot, namely that many unsold RX 6700/6800/6900-class GPUs are still available. Hopefully AMD knows what it's up against and can deliver a compelling reason to choose the RX 7600 over the existing RX 66xx-series GPUs. If not, the RX 7600 could be a hard sell at anywhere close to $300.

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.

  • oofdragon
    DOA
    Reply
  • MergleBergle
    Don't worry, if that ends up being the *actual* price here, Canada always pays a "not USA" tax before tax. You can probably knock $30-$50 off the USD price after conversion. TRUST ME, I KNOW.
    Reply
  • zecoeco
    A totally misleading title and a laughable bias against AMD.
    It says more expensive than RX 6650, while in the article it mentions that it's rumored to cost $299, which less than the MSRP of RX 6650 XT when it launched, but more than the current discounted price.
    WHO ON EARTH expects new GPUs to cost less? It's all going upwards, and everybody knows that.
    So, to think that AMD will release a GPU priced less than the current price of its previous generation equivalent is laughable, nonsense and completely unrealistic in the wake of the economy inflation and expensive new nodes and wafer costs.
    Reply
  • Giroro
    AMD doesn't compete on price, they just follow whatever Nvidia dictates, with a slight discount for their inferior tech.

    If the De Facto Monopoly decides GPUs are going to be a greedy cash-grab, then AMD will be a good little boy and slot their cards neatly into their proper place in-between Daddy Nvidia's lineup.
    AMD likes laughably absurd profit margins too, you know.
    Reply
  • MergleBergle
    zecoeco said:
    A totally misleading title and a laughable bias against AMD.
    It says more expensive than RX 6650, while in the article it mentions that it's rumored to cost $299, which less than the MSRP of RX 6650 XT when it launched, but more than the current discounted price.
    WHO ON EARTH expects new GPUs to cost less? It's all going upwards, and everybody knows that.
    So, to think that AMD will release a GPU priced less than the current price of its previous generation equivalent is laughable, nonsense and completely unrealistic in the wake of the economy inflation and expensive new nodes and wafer costs.
    Excellent point. And frankly most 6650 xt models I see here sell around those prices (or higher) on the same website. Only the Sapphire Pulse model is noticeably less expensive. And from what I've read, this looks to be a faster, more efficient card. It's not the equiv of a 6600 vanilla 2.0. I fully expect this to be faster than a 6650 XT by 10% or perhaps a little more.
    Reply
  • Amdlova
    DOA
    Reply
  • -Fran-
    I'm looking forward to see how AMD is going to put their foot in their mouth at Computex with this announcement xD

    I am SO looking forward to it.

    Regards.
    Reply
  • Cooe
    😑🤦 RDNA 3 has NUMEROUS significant internal architecture upgrades/differences... The architecture literally has two separate clock-speeds. When do you remember RDNA 2 doing that? If RDNA 3 had no performance gains, the new 780m iGPU would be no faster than the 680m it replaced as they both have 12CU's. No offense, but Aaron's work for this site has just been getting worse and WORSE, and more and more lazy recently.
    Reply
  • -Fran-
    Cooe said:
    😑🤦 RDNA 3 has NUMEROUS significant internal architecture upgrades/differences... The architecture literally has two separate clock-speeds. When do you remember RDNA 2 doing that? If RDNA 3 had no performance gains, the new 780m iGPU would be no faster than the 680m it replaced as they both have 12CU's. No offense, but Aaron's work for this site has just been getting worse and WORSE, and more and more lazy recently.
    Uh... You can say a car can have 3 4 or 5 wheels and as a consumer you wouldn't care about it, unless you have a specific use for one less wheel, the extra wheel or just the standard 4.

    What does RDNA3 have that RDNA2 does not for which you particularly care about? Better Ray Tracing? A slightly better performance per watt? Pure better "raster" performance? More VRAM (?) ?

    Whether this card makes it will come down to the price and the outgoing competition. If this card gives less performance and less VRAM compared to the 6700 10GB for about the same price at a slightly higher power, then it's basically DOA to a lot of people until better performers in the range stop being sold. That's just the way it will go.

    Funnily enough, if the 3050 is any indication, the 4060 price will be irrelevant and it'll just sell like hotcakes xD

    Regards.
    Reply
  • btmedic04
    This article is awful on so many levels. im convinced that the only reason aaron still has a job here is because all of the clicks his articles get to point out his awful points :ROFLMAO:

    you cannot compare the shader count between two different architectures and draw conclusions from that. rdna 3 has double the ALU's per shader compared to rdna 2. secondly, rdna 3 doubles the L0 and L1 cache, while adding 50% more L2 cache. rdna 3 also reduces cache latency compared to rdna 2 due to clock speed improvements and doubles the bandwidth compared to rdna 2. infinity cache bandwidth is also doubled, and these are just some of the architectural improvements that you so conveniently glossed over, let alone any clock speed improvements.

    Lastly, do you really think that amd is going to continue to produce rdna 2 gpus once they launch their full rdna 3 product stack? if so, ive got a bridge to sell you.

    Do I think its a good buy at $300? Not really. 8gb equipped gpus need to be below $300, not at $300 in 2023. Wait for the reviews and inevitable price drops after launch
    Reply