Well, it’s that time again, another highly anticipated graphics card launch has been and gone. It was AMD’s turn to potentially disappoint consumers with the lack of available stock of its mid-range Radeon RX 6800 XT, and the budget Radeon RX 6800 GPUs.
Leading up to the launch there has been a number of conflicting reports both from news outlets and AMD representatives themselves about stock levels and what prospective buyers should be anticipating on the day. Various news outlets were reporting that like the RTX 30 series, AMD would be almost mirroring them in terms of stock levels – next to no graphics cards available. These were backed up by retailers for example Morele.net in Poland who implied that they have only been allocated a minute percerntage of GPUs to match the demand. However, on the flip side, there were also conflicting messages from companies such as ASUS, the actual manufacturers of the graphics cards, suggesting that stock levels of the Radeon RX 6800 for example would be pretty sizable.
So, how did it all go down come that 9 AM EST (2 PM GMT) launch? Well, sadly for you AMD enthusiasts waiting to get your hands on a 6000 series GPU, you were more than likely disappointed. It was the rumors coming out of the news outlets that were unfortunately true with extremely paper-thin stock levels of both the 6800 XT and the 6800, leaving the majority of individuals wanting. We’d go as far to say that this GPU launch could be on par with one of the worst yet with some retailers showing out of stock buttons before the products even went live or simply not making those buttons work at all. Even Amazon, the biggest online retailer in the world, had a minimal number of GPUs available, again selling out in seconds and showing that dreaded ‘Currently Unavailable’ message on the product pages.
More on those retailers, surprise surprise, websites looked like they either had slow mode turned on or decided not to load at all. Overclockers in the UK was a particularly good example with the site failing to load for many users well before that 9 AM EST (2 PM GMT) mark, clearly cracking under the weight of sheer number of people flocking to the product pages.
Taking a look at consumer feedback, AMD will certainly have to put out some apology tweets or statements regarding how poor the stock levels actually were with 99% of people up in arms. Comments all over social networks and forums such as Reddit all echoed the same message – anger and disappointment not only for this launch but also the knock-on effect of the pretty disastrous Ryzen 5000 series release.
All in all, what can we say, another shoddy outing for a major tech company this quarter. We’ve seen Nvidia fall flat with their RTX 30 series release and now AMD has done the same with both their Ryzen 5000 series CPU launch and the first two 6000 series GPUs. What we can hope for is that stock gets replenished this side of 2020 or it could be 2021 before we get those all-important components in our powerful PC builds.
