The AMD RX 6500 XT might not be as affordable as we thought

techradar.com:

AMD revealed the wallet-friendly Radeon RX 6500 XT graphics card for desktop PCs at CES 2022, with an MSRP of $199 (around £150 / AU$280), though sadly this new 'affordable' GPU has already been the victim of artificial inflation.

As reported by WCCFTech, AMD made several statements over the CES show in interviews regarding its determination to keep the cost of the RX 6500 XT low and stock plentiful, with AMD CEO Lisa Su telling PCWorld in an interview that «We’re positioning the launch such that – and I know, you guys always say, ’Well, yeah, they’re just saying that’ – but we really are positioning the launch at a $199 price point. It is sort of affordable to the mainstream. You know, we intend to have a lot of product out there.»

Unfortunately, some retailers have other ideas about the price tag, with CowCotland reporting that some stores in France have it already priced up at €299 after tax. A direct conversion from $199 would be €176, making the RX 6500 XT over 70% over the MSRP set in US dollars.

The RX 6500 XT is a Navi 24 (6nm) GPU and boasts 1,024 Stream Processors, with 4GB GDDR6 memory (and a memory bandwidth of up to 144GB/s). The base clock speed is 2610MHz with boost up to 2815MHz, which would make this firmly a budget card in regards to performance, so the higher-than-expected price tag is sure to rub some salt into the wounds of folk trying to buy a new, affordable GPU.

It isn't clear if the GPU will be made available at a more affordable price closer to that of the MSRP on AMD's official website, but the inflated price isn't anything we haven't seen before. Many of the graphics cards in recent years have had non-correlated prices outside of the US, especially across third-party retailers, something that