AMD’s Radeon RX 6500 XT is possibly the only present generation graphics card to sell within 20-25% of its $200 MSRP. Although technically a bit of an abomination, courtesy of the 4GB VRAM buffer, this budget Navi 2x GPU has been selling rather well. The reason is ample supply and an affordable (yet not acceptable) price tag. Things are much darker behind the curtain though. According to MLID, AMD deliberately set the price of the Radeon RX 6500 XT to $250 in order to milk gamers.
The YouTuber claims that Radeon Team essentially bribed its closest AIBs (PowerColor and XFX) to sell the RX 6500 XT at its MSRP of $200 on launch day, thereafter allowing them and the rest of the board partners to push the prices up to $250. AMD expects the GPU to return to its MSRP of $200 by the end of summer, but for the time being, the plan is to make as much money as possible.
The MSRP of $200 is technically for a GPU that features a barrel bottom heatsink, suitable for only GT1030-class cards. Obviously, no board partner is going to pair the 6500 XT with such a cooler which pushes the price with a proper one to $250. To make matters worse, this isn’t the first time AMD has done something like this. Apparently, the same practice was repeated with the entire Radeon RX 6000 range.
