AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT graphics cards are now being sold for far less than the manufacturer suggested retail price (MSRP) in Europe. One of Germany's biggest online PC tech retailers, Mindfactory, has a twin fan cooler PowerColor design advertised at €169 including VAT. This Euro price is equivalent to USD $189, and we must remember that Germany's VAT is quite an impactful sales tax at 19%. If we remove the added VAT to get to a price that would be advertised in the US, we would have $159.
Taking another view of the above figures, the Radeon RX 6500 XT sells about 35% below MSRP in Europe. If the same discount were applied to the US MSRP, we would be seeing these graphics cards advertised by retailers at about $130.
If you browse to the MindStar special offers section of the site, you can see there are two PowerColor models on special offer at Mindfactory today. The single-fan ITX model is €169, and the dual-fan Fighter model is just €10 more.
We visited this special offers section from the RX 6500 XT search results page, which had the same cards listed at a higher price. However, on returning to the search results page (with seven different models available) we noticed the prices had dipped to match the special offers. With these cookie-induced shopping shenanigans in mind, please check around the Mindfactory site and peruse the MindStar section if you're looking for the best prices.
Three weeks ago, we reported on Mindfactory being perhaps the first retailer of any significant size selling graphics cards beneath MSRP. At the time its best RX 6500 XT price was €199, so to drop to €169 in three weeks represents significant movement.
PC enthusiasts and gamers might not be that interested in the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT due to its panning by reviewers. We reviewed the XFX RX 6500 XT QICK 210 and were disappointed at the MSRP and the fact that previous budget GPUs could easily outgun this new 4GB kid on the block.
That begs the question of whether the RX 6500 XT is a bellwether of trends in the graphics card market, or a special case. Looking at the data we have, it is indeed something of a special case due to how far it undershot expectations and how much it is improved upon by its nearest Nvidia Ampere competitor, the GeForce RTX 3050 (MSRP $250, just $50 more). However, there are have been plenty of other reports in recent days and weeks showing the house of cards that supports the crazy PC GPU pricing is starting to teeter.
Four days ago, we reported some welcome price reductions for GeForce RTX 3080 models and noted that EVGA's online store offered cards like the RTX 3080 12GB and RTX 3080 Ti at MSRPs. Taking a wider view, we also noted that GPU prices had dropped another 9% in the first half of March. Normally this overall market view has been a monthly update, but thanks to the accelerating rate of price drops, we thought it was worth keeping you up to date with the (good) news.
