The Agony Continues: AMD’s RX 6500 XT to Retail for Around €299; An Utterly Appalling Price

Our hopes — which, in retrospect, were quite optimistic — didn’t last long; ASUS has just come out and confirmed that two of their RX 6500 XT SKUs (the ones whose MSRP was supposed to be $199) are going to retail for a whopping €299, if not even more should you opt for the TUF Gaming edition.

What a weird timeline we’re all inhabiting. Finding an entry-level GPU for an even remotely acceptable price seems to be a challenge of epic proportions. If the RX 6500 XT is going to retail for nearly double its MSRP (a wholly disgusting price, no doubt), the NVIDIA RTX 3050 could very well reach €500 upon release — sounds ludicrous, but nothing would surprise us as this point.

So, if you were looking to upgrade your rig or perhaps get in on the RDNA 2 hype train, you’ll have to wait a bit longer.

RX 6500 XT | A Price That Only Adds Insult to Injury

The fact that this GPU is only marginally better than the century-old RX570 makes this whole ordeal feel ever more like a farce (or a nightmare, rather). We should really forgo any talk about its efficiency or advanced architecture or die size or what have you — these are all “ornaments” employed to divert our attention from the fact that we’re getting “skinned alive.”

How in the world ASUS plans on selling this particular model at nearly twice its intended MSRP is beyond our comprehension. It is by no means a gaming behemoth, and its meager 4GB of VRAM will hardly suffice for any kind of crypto mining — Ethereum least of all.

It’s hard not to get offended by this horrid status quo and, in a way, it feels like everyone’s “in on it” — everyone expect the end consumer, of course. We generally wouldn’t mind, but it’s the budget-minded among us that have been on the “receiving end” for far too long.

Needless to say, gaming on a budget will have to be restricted to integrated graphics cards for the foreseeable future. We were hoping that these GPUs, specifically, would be the long-awaited solution (a panacea, if you will), but those hopes were dashed about as quickly as they were brought into existence.

Fortunately, “Rembrandt” RDNA 2 APUs from AMD seem to be extremely capable (we’re talking GTX 1650 levels of performance), so if you’ve been looking to buy a gaming laptop, you’ll finally have a series of relatively affordable (and surprisingly potent) options to choose from in just a few weeks!