As mentioned by a couple of the top review sites, it was pretty obvious that board partners on the AMD side not just retailers who wrongfully got the blame this time around but certainly have been to blame for raising prices due to demand set the AIB and even their reference boards at ridiculously over what should be MSRP prices. Those for the most part would be in the 40 to 70 dollar range and for that you get better cooling and likely a guaranteed boost in performance over standard that is fair. However the AMD AIB cards came out as much as 200 dollars over MSRP rivaling the high price record from the mining boom.
I saw in a video a couple nights back showing that with the new RTX 2060 Ti's, several AIB partners following what happened on the AMD AIB release, was going to jack the prices up on those cards too. However more so because a lot of them having to be air shipped to the states in time for the holiday really did sharply increase their cost. Nvidia jumped in and made them lower their prices to normal amount over MSRP.
I hope that AMD will do similar as more cards come out. So far the only thing that I have heard officials from AMD is that there will be cards at or closer to MSRP coming from AIB partners. What measures they are taking to do that, they did not say.
Hopefully it will be effective but no time table on when availability or when pricing will drop closer to normal was given.
A couple review sites only say to expect more cards to ship in total from AIB in the 4th quarter than what Nvidia ships.
If that happens then a whole lot of cards will have to be available in the next few weeks. Time will tell.
Many reviewers are saying that the 6800 non xt is a pointless card at the price it is sold at and if cheaper would be the way to go vs a RTX 3070. The upcoming RTX 3060 Ti looks to be only 9-12% slower than the 3070 and that 3060 ti is a whopping $200 less than the cheapest AIB 6800s right now if sold at MSRP of $400 dollars. AMD will hopefully have their 5600 series out at that or hopefully a bit lower prices. I think that the green team is going to force AMD to sell those 6700 series cards cheaper than they probably wanted to.
Of course the trick is actually getting any of them. LOL
