AMD’s RX 7800 XT appears to be getting price cuts to make the graphics card more competitive compared to rival Nvidia GPUs, or at least there are hints of this in the US.
Keep in mind that the official MSRP of the 7800 XT is $499.99 (although custom third-party models may be more expensive), VideoCardz spotted ASRock’s Challenger RX 7800 XT dropped to $489.99 at Newegg. This is after a $10 discount code was applied at checkout, but as the tech site notes, this is the lowest we’ve seen this AMD GPU at.
However, we noticed that there is now – at the time of writing – a cheaper model, with Gigabyte’s RX 7800 XT Gaming OC Marked down to $479.99, again with a discount code at checkout. Don’t forget that this is a model with a decent overclock too (it can boost up to 2565MHz, above the reference boost speed of 2430MHz).
That’s a sharp value proposition for what is an excellent gaming GPU that currently sits at the top of our list of the best graphics cards no less, and has been selling well in recent times.
If sales are good and the card is excellent, you may wonder: why has the price dropped? Well, that’s all tied to Nvidia’s new RTX refreshes and Lovelace’s mid-range refresh, as we’ll discuss next.
Analysis: Super news for consumers
We suspect AMD is whispering to its partners to cut prices on key mid-range GPUs like the 7800 XT due to the aforementioned Nvidia launches, and these moves are the first tentative signs of this happening more widely (give here our speculation).
Nvidia just released the RTX 4070 Super, which came in at number two in our best GPU rankings, just behind the 7800 XT, and is now in our opinion the best Nvidia graphics card (pound for pound, as it were).
Here’s the gist of the matter, which is that the RTX 4070 Super was released at a suggested retail price of $599 in the US, which is the same as the standard RTX 4070, so Nvidia had to drop the latter to $549. And now it’s even even lower, at $535 and $540 for two models on Newegg. So it’s this fact that the 7800 XT’s MSRP is close that AMD (apparently) wants to ensure its mid-range champion continues to look like excellent value for money.
Is this the start of a real battle for position in the mid-range GPU arena? We think so, as it’s certainly possible that the RTX 4070 will drop even lower than it does now, so AMD’s partners can go a little further with 7800 XT discounts. We’re further bringing these GPUs back to the level they should have been in the first place in our books. (We still can’t get over paying $500, or the equivalent elsewhere, for a mid-range graphics card, and we don’t think we’re the only ones, but anyway – that’s a whole other argument ).
Hopefully, as these price movements recede in the US, other regions will follow suit, especially if this is the result of a push from AMD (which we don’t know, of course – but we can only hope).
As a side note, the RX 7700 XT is now $440 for the cheapest model on Newegg US, so the upgrade to a 7800 XT is currently only $40 extra, making the smaller brother look even shakier than we already noticed. in our review. Will there also be price reductions for the 7700 XT?