With just a couple of days before AMD officially announces the RX 9070 family of GPUs, listings for these graphics cards momentarily appeared online on Micro Center. Although it seems that the retailer has already taken them down, we caught a glimpse of their prices, and we aren’t happy. We saw one RX 9070 listing — the ASRock RX 9070 Challenger Triple Fan — for $649.99. The cheapest RX 9070 XT we saw — the ASRock RX 9070 XT Steel Legend Triple Fan — was listed for $699.99.
Since AMD hasn’t announced prices for these GPUs yet, we hope that these are just placeholder prices and that the real pricing will be much lower. After all, the company already denied that the starting prices for the 9070 and 9070 XT are $749 and $899, respectively. But if these leaked numbers are true, then the 9070 XT isn’t much lower than the RTX 5070 Ti’s MSRP of $749, and the vanilla 9070 is much higher than the 5070’s $549 launch price. The company also compared the 9070 XT’s performance to that of the 7900 GRE, which had a launch price of just $549, while the 9070 could match the 7800 XT, which had a launch price of just $499.
AMD doesn’t appear to have plans to sell a Made by AMD reference card to the public, so the GPUs that we saw listed may not even sell at MSRP. We expect there will be some “MSRP” variants at launch, but whether or not they remain available and in stock will depend on AMD’s supply. This is also true of Nvidia’s graphics cards and the RTX 5070 Ti, as Nvidia didn’t create a Founders Edition version of that GPU. We only saw a few listings at the MSRP, and some options even hit nearly double the launch price. That might be due more to the retail outlets than the AIB partners, of course.
Many gamers and enthusiasts are anticipating the arrival of AMD’s competitors to Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs. With shortages still plaguing RTX 50-series GPUs despite being launched weeks ago, the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 GPUs might be the only real option for mid-range GPUs. AMD also renamed its graphics card lineup to make it easier to match and compare against the competition, so we expect the 9070 XT to be competitive with the 5070 Ti. However, leaked synthetic benchmark tests indicate it more closely matches the RTX 4070 Super, while the RTX 5070 Ti outperformed it by approximately 28%. We’ll see where Team Red lands once we get our hands on these GPUs and are able to see how they perform in the real world.