News Shortage Disaster: AMD RX 6800 & 6800 XTs Out of Stock Everywhere

What a cluster f it was this morning.

EVERY SINGLE MODEL WAS AT LEAST $150 OVER MSRP. In some cases $250 over! It was also sold out from minute 1.

I'm starting to think there's back room deals and AMD/Warehouses are selling straight to miners also.
 

elroy.coltof

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Jumping on the bandwagon I see, nVidia is to blame, now AMD is to blame. We all know that there is fixed production capacity. Has it occurred to anyone that the problem is neither nVidia nor AMD, but everyone being greedy demanding they must have the latest greatest GPU 'on launch day'?

I'd have thought that the people writing these things are business savvy enough to realize planning production capacity around these peak demand moments is commercial suicide, you'd have idle factories most of the time. And if they stockpiled for it they'd have to pay for storage of huge numbers of cards driving up the price.

Chill ... relax ... the cards will be available in due time. The only people with any reason to be miffed about this are those that had their current GPU fail on them. Since they 'have to' buy a card now.
 
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Nov 25, 2020
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I planned to build my first gaming PC six months ago, scoping out all the parts & waiting for next gen GPU+CPU. Trying & trying, I never had a chance on an RTX3080/AMD RX6800 GPU or AMD5000 series CPU. So what did I do? I just bought a suped up Raptor z55a from Velocity Micro (as much as I wanted to build myself, I did not want a PC with prev gen hardware, not now). You can buy a PC from an online PC builder with next gen GPU+CPU (they seem to be well stocked from what I was told). So, that's an option, but most ppl are upgrading their PCs & it's just not necessary. So, it's a bad time for a DIY builder, but a good time to have your PC built by PC builder w/ good reputation.
 
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I know. Even though Nvidia sold $175 million dollars of GPUs to miners.
Which is about 8 percent of its total consumer GPU sales. (Based on overall 'Gaming' sales of $2.27 billion.) The problem with RTX 30-series shortages definitely aren't due to miners, though. They don't help the situation, but there was never going to be enough to go around at launch. We also don't know how many of those GPUs weren't even RTX 30-series -- that $175 million might have been largely 20-series parts when Ethereum and BTC prices started going up.
 
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didn't one of the big-wigs in AMD tweet about being happy to take someone's money when they bet that AMD would have a supply issue, just like NVidia?
It was about whether Big Navi would be a "paper launch" or not. Which is basically up to your interpretation of what constitutes a paper launch. Obviously the cards all sold out, and that was always going to happen I think. What I really want to know is how many cards were even shipped prior to the launch. Considering some retail outlets said they got ZERO 6800 series cards, that's pretty damning.

As I've said elsewhere, though, which would you do as AMD?
  1. Make 13 Zen 3 compute die, which could go into either six Ryzen 9 chips and one Ryzen 5/7 chip (sales = $3600 minimum, $5200 maximum)
  2. Make 2 Navi 21 chips (sales = $1160 minimum, $1300 maximum)
Now consider that for the graphics cards, probably $600 goes to other components (memory, PCB, VRM, etc.) while for the CPUs the only major cost is the die and packaging (maybe $300). It would be bad business if you're wafer constrained to make lots of GPUs when the CPUs make four to five times as much money.
 

mac_angel

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It was about whether Big Navi would be a "paper launch" or not. Which is basically up to your interpretation of what constitutes a paper launch. Obviously the cards all sold out, and that was always going to happen I think. What I really want to know is how many cards were even shipped prior to the launch. Considering some retail outlets said they got ZERO 6800 series cards, that's pretty damning.

As I've said elsewhere, though, which would you do as AMD?
  1. Make 13 Zen 3 compute die, which could go into either six Ryzen 9 chips and one Ryzen 5/7 chip (sales = $3600 minimum, $5200 maximum)
  2. Make 2 Navi 21 chips (sales = $1160 minimum, $1300 maximum)
Now consider that for the graphics cards, probably $600 goes to other components (memory, PCB, VRM, etc.) while for the CPUs the only major cost is the die and packaging (maybe $300). It would be bad business if you're wafer constrained to make lots of GPUs when the CPUs make four to five times as much money.

I'm sure you know WAY more about the cost ratio than I do. I knew it was going to be a supply issue, not just for Big Navi, but all chips. I can't remember specifically (I used to be an IT Tech at an IBM Research and Development lab, but now a lot of health issues, on permanent disability, 25+ pills a day, my memory and timeline kinda suck), but I think a couple of things happened before the pandemic pretty much shut down the world, and I remember telling my friends that certain places in the tech industry would feel it several months away. The Covid-19 thing just made it worse.
My personal opinions; one, I'm a fan of NVidia, but they have been messing up a LOT lately. Hubris, in my mind, especially when it came to trying to get the chips done at TSMC. But I also believe they should have kept with the idea of add in cards (PhysX). Not just for PhysX, though their PhysX has always been better than other options, including Havok. But they could have used it for their proprietary stuff as well. HairWorks, TurfWorks, etc. I would rather that they have made those things open source, proprietary just hurts the customers. But they also could have set that up easily for an add in card for Ray Tracing. These add-in cards would mostly just be compute cards, so it's not like they'd need a lot of power, cooling, or RAM. Again, I maybe talking about something I don't know - I know more hardware than software. But with the way NVidia Control Panel seems to work, and being able to select CUDA cores/cards when you have multiple cards, and still select options for PhysX, then I think it shouldn't be that hard to direct stuff like HairWorks, TurfWorks, etc, to the PhysX card. That also seems like it would have been a good option for when the Crypto mining crapped out on them and they had all the extra stock of mid-tier cards. Throw a bit of development into the drivers and PhysX options again for those things, and remarket all those extra cards they got shipped back.
 
Nov 25, 2020
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What a cluster f it was this morning.

EVERY SINGLE MODEL WAS AT LEAST $150 OVER MSRP. In some cases $250 over! It was also sold out from minute 1.

I'm starting to think there's back room deals and AMD/Warehouses are selling straight to miners also.

Scalpers. Though many scalpers come from the mining scene. If not all of them.

Scalpers are probably a blessing to both vendors and manufacturers. That is why they are allowed. The savings on warranty replacements are great. No more warranty repairs. Similarly vendors don't have to worry about replace or exchange. The manufacturers and vendors don't care who buys them...though they pretend to.

Also, a thing to note, many of the scalpers are likely in-company people. If Gamestop was anything to go by. So people within NewEgg, Amazon etc.
 
Oct 22, 2020
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Scalpers wouldn't matter if the supply was anywhere close to adequate.

Opening for Intel if they have the designs.
Any other year and supply for all of these hardware launches would have been adequate. Nintendo Switches, bicycles - hell, freaking toilet paper - were virtually impossible to buy back in the spring too, although everyone has evidently completely forgotten that was a thing that happened. The fact that it's a problem that has been utterly blind to companies and even platforms should clue you in to a greater issue at play.
 
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Juan_Bijero

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There are many factors for the limited supply: AMD sent emails to it's Team Red Plus members ahead of the release to give them a link to get theirs ahead of everyone else - really slimy move. Add to that the fact that both Ryzen 5000 series processors and Radeon 6000 series video cards both use TSMC's 7nm silicon. But most importantly, the demand for computer components such as CPUs and GPUs is like 10X normal demand due to Covid-19. I bought an RTX 2070 Super in late July from Microcenter because I was worried that there wouldn't be any of the new video cards. I lucked out that I purchased an EVGA card that was eligible for set up to an newer faster card. I requested my step up on the day of the RTX 3080 launch in the first hour or so and received my new card approximately 2 weeks ago. Micro Center requires that all CPU and GPU sales be purchased in the stores and not online. I lucked out in both instances because I only had to go without my desktop from less than a week.
 

VforV

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One issue is availability yes, but the biggest issue are the hiked up prices. The stores are now actually scalping everywhere with up to 50% more over MSRP! And mostly +50%. The scumbaggery has gotten to the roof...

Sony with it's PS5 looks more and more like the one that will get my money and both nvidia and AMD (along with the scalper stores) will get my middle finger.
 

McGaz

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I've had all parts to my build except the CPU and GFX card for 7 or 8 weeks and it looks like I probably won't get either this year :/

I was hoping the big Navi cards would satisfy some of the 3080 pre-orders to clear the backlog, but there seems to be even less of them!
 

clsmithj

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Just an observation of a few things that I noticed about AMD since 2019 that seem very corporate greedy.

1. When they balked at motherboard manufactures that were adding PCIe Gen-4 switch to AGESA BIOS for X470 and older motherboards and forced them to remove it for the launch of ZEN2 and X570 chipset, when part of PCIe Gen-4 would have been fully capable of running from the ZEN2 CPU on any AM4 platform.

2. Killing off the short lived X399 HEDT socket, making ZEN2 Threadripper incompatible , (attempted to do the same thing with X470/B450 and ZEN3 but caught backlash and backed down.)

3. Introducing Smart Access Memory and locking it to ZEN3 and X570/B550 platforms, (now that NVIDIA announced that the technology isn't proprietary and they can set the same feature for their Geforce cards for all Intel/AMD platforms, you now see AMD trying to widen SAM support to include X470/B450) . SAM should have been made for all ZEN generations of Ryzen including Threadripper.
 
It was about whether Big Navi would be a "paper launch" or not. Which is basically up to your interpretation of what constitutes a paper launch. Obviously the cards all sold out, and that was always going to happen I think. What I really want to know is how many cards were even shipped prior to the launch. Considering some retail outlets said they got ZERO 6800 series cards, that's pretty damning.

As I've said elsewhere, though, which would you do as AMD?
  1. Make 13 Zen 3 compute die, which could go into either six Ryzen 9 chips and one Ryzen 5/7 chip (sales = $3600 minimum, $5200 maximum)
  2. Make 2 Navi 21 chips (sales = $1160 minimum, $1300 maximum)
Now consider that for the graphics cards, probably $600 goes to other components (memory, PCB, VRM, etc.) while for the CPUs the only major cost is the die and packaging (maybe $300). It would be bad business if you're wafer constrained to make lots of GPUs when the CPUs make four to five times as much money.

This is a huge part of it right here. CPU's just have higher margin at the end if the day. With limited production you always try to maximize your average margin. Thats just smart business.

I think there is a general fear here we will have a repeat of 4 years ago where you would pay $550 for a rx580 if you could find one. We sold pallets of these cards just disappear to scalpers and miners at insane prices. It was dark times for gamers.

It was almost time for 20 series and navi by the time prices came back down to near msrp. Why would you pay msrp for last gen tech? Thankfully the mining market crashed and you could pick up a 8gb 580 for $140 after mir. 1060s were $199

So will we have to wait for next gen before prices come back down? Maybe.

Ive been listening to all the leading youtube channels about availability and pricing.

I know when they are spot on and when they are bias and full of bs, or they are being mislead.

Hardware unboxed reviewed cards and they said aib were being sketchy about pricing because AMD was being sketchy at what they were charging them.

That is an out right dishonest statement from the AIB's. The truth is they were feeling each other out to see if they could get away with higher pricing. This is easily demonstrable by the extremely wide margin of pricing from $700 reference aib to $900 asus rog.

That is a $250 premium over reference.

I have two contacts inside an industry that makes custom heat pipe heatsinks. I cant comment who. Sorry. But they both told me the same thing. The most expensive difference between their base model cooler and their best offering is ~$25. Higher grade components dont cost that much more either.

So lets say AMD is charging them more and they have to charge $700 for reference. $900 - $700 is $200

$200 - $60 (higher end components plus additional margin for those parts) = $140 difference.

Whats that $140? Pure profit for the AIB. Tooling does take a bite out of that. But not near that much.

They are taking advantage of the situation.
 
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This is a huge part of it right here. CPU's just have higher margin at the end if the day. With limited production you always try to maximize your average margin. Thats just smart business.

I think there is a general fear here we will have a repeat of 4 years ago where you would pay $550 for a rx580 if you could find one. We sold pallets of these cards just disappear to scalpers and miners at insane prices. It was dark times for gamers.

It was almost time for 20 series and navi by the time prices came back down to near msrp. Why would you pay msrp for last gen tech? Thankfully the mining market crashed and you could pick up a 8gb 580 for $140 after mir. 1060s were $199

So will we have to wait for next gen before prices come back down? Maybe.

Ive been listening to all the leading youtube channels about availability and pricing.

I know when they are spot on and when they are bias and full of bs, or they are being mislead.

Hardware unboxed reviewed cards and they said aib were being sketchy about pricing because AMD was being sketchy at what they were charging them.

That is an out right dishonest statement from the AIB's. The truth is they were feeling each other out to see if they could get away with higher pricing. This is easily demonstrable by the extremely wide margin of pricing from $700 reference aib to $900 asus rog.

That is a $250 premium over reference.

I have two contacts inside an industry that makes custom heat pipe heatsinks. I cant comment who. Sorry. But they both told me the same thing. The most expensive difference between their base model cooler and their best offering is ~$25. Higher grade components dont cost that much more either.

So lets say AMD is charging them more and they have to charge $700 for reference. $900 - $700 is $200

$200 - $60 (higher end components plus additional margin for those parts) = $140 difference.

Whats that $140? Pure profit for the AIB. Tooling does take a bite out of that. But not near that much.

They are taking advantage of the situation.
I think the high prices from AIBs is also related to supply. If Asus thinks it can sell 100,000 RX 6800 XT cards, and then AMD says it can only supply 1,000 GPUs for the launch, Asus knows every card will instantly sell. It far easier to drop prices once supply stabilizes, and so Asus is taking its piece of the Navi 21 pie and not leaving all of it for the retail outlets. That's my take anyway. We all know AIB cards with RGB and the bells and whistles are jacked up on pricing far more than the cost of the extras, but R&D is a cost as well. I think $50 is a reasonable premium for $10-$25 of extra hardware. $250 is definitely a bit much. Six months from now, the Strix 6800 XT will probably go for $700 ($50 above reference), assuming supply can catch up to demand.
 

VTXcnME

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Chill ... relax ... the cards will be available in due time. The only people with any reason to be miffed about this are those that had their current GPU fail on them. Since they 'have to' buy a card now.

100%

I've been piling parts in the corner. I was hoping to score parts more quickly, but it's not gonna happen. In time. They can't be out of stock forever.
 
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clsmithj

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It was about whether Big Navi would be a "paper launch" or not. Which is basically up to your interpretation of what constitutes a paper launch. Obviously the cards all sold out, and that was always going to happen I think. What I really want to know is how many cards were even shipped prior to the launch. Considering some retail outlets said they got ZERO 6800 series cards, that's pretty damning.

As I've said elsewhere, though, which would you do as AMD?
  1. Make 13 Zen 3 compute die, which could go into either six Ryzen 9 chips and one Ryzen 5/7 chip (sales = $3600 minimum, $5200 maximum)
  2. Make 2 Navi 21 chips (sales = $1160 minimum, $1300 maximum)
Now consider that for the graphics cards, probably $600 goes to other components (memory, PCB, VRM, etc.) while for the CPUs the only major cost is the die and packaging (maybe $300). It would be bad business if you're wafer constrained to make lots of GPUs when the CPUs make four to five times as much money.
As AMD I would have canned the ZEN 2 XT launch, it was pointless.

I would have also canned Ryzen 4000G Renoir OEM/Japan Retail launch, all it did was cause confusion.

Focused on ZEN3 and Radeon 6000.
Establish an ordering system for cards with consumers who want to buy a reference RX 6800 or RX 6800 XT.