AMD Launches Radeon RX 6800 XT Midnight Black Edition, Predictably Sells Out

So, it might seem like an odd time for AMD to release a special edition of its Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card, but that's just what the company did today. Witness the Radeon RX 6800 XT Midnight Black Edition, which doesn't appear to be any different from the standard version other than having a bit more black around the fan shroud.

Even though it's called the Midnight Black Edition, there's still plenty of silver trim on the fans themselves and the cooler. We think that AMD could have at least sprung for an anodized black finish on the I/O plate, but we digress...

Interestingly, besides adopting a slightly blacker design, there's not much else to distinguish the Midnight Black Edition from the standard card. Both feature 72 compute units, 4,608 stream processors, a game clock of 2,015 MHz, and a boost clock of 2,250 MHz. They even share the same 16GB of GDDR6 memory and peak single-precision performance of 20.74 TFLOPs.

Here's what AMD had to say about the card in an email obtained by Videocardz:

Based on community feedback and popular demand, we have created a select quantity of AMD Radeon™ RX 6800 XT (Midnight Black) graphics cards featuring the same great performance of the widely popular AMD Radeon™ RX 6800 XT.

This is an exclusive advance notice to members of the AMD Red Team community and this offer has limited availability, while supplies last.

Frankly, the Radeon RX 6800 XT Midnight Black Edition leaves us scratching our heads a bit, even if it took minimal investment from AMD to develop it. With that said, the card carries the same $649 price tag as the standard version. The only problem is that, predictably, the card is completely out of stock. While these special edition cards are all well and good, we wished that we could get our hands on the standard cards first...