AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT Is Almost Impossible To Buy, Despite Initial Claims
Unfortunately, reality has set in, which means that the Radeon RX 6600 XT is proceeding much like every other major GPU launch for the past year... poorly. In other words, the cards immediately sold out or simply weren't available in the first place when sales opened this morning at 9am ET.
Best Buy only lists three Radeon RX 6600 XT cards from XFX priced from $379.99 to $479.99, but they're all out of stock for shipping. There isn't even an option to do store pickup or see if your local store has inventory (which is probably a futile effort anyway).
A trip to Amazon shows that the online retail giant hasn't even activated listings for the cards yet. The next viable option from the AMD camp is the already launched Radeon RX 6700 XT, but you'll pay at least $829 to get a PowerColor Hellhound card from a third-party seller on Amazon. The MSRP for the Radeon RX 6700 XT is $479.
Finally, we come to Newegg, which has the most significant number of Radeon RX 6600 XT cards listed (19 in total). The cards range in price from $379.99 for the Gigabyte Radeon RX 6600 XT EAGLE 8G on up to $579.99 for the MSI Gaming Radeon RX 6600 XT. The only problem is that every single card is unsurprisingly out of stock.
At this point, there are only three ways to purchase a Radeon RX 6600 XT. First, you can head on over to eBay and hope to get one from a scalper, but you'll likely pay at least a couple hundred dollars extra in markup. Secondly, you could find a pre-built system that offers the Radeon RX 6600 XT as a configurable option. That's probably your best chance at securing a card.
The final option is to take your chances entering Newegg's Shuffle program, which doesn't even guarantee that you'll get an opportunity to purchase the limited number of Radeon RX 6600 XT cards available.
At this point, we've pretty much given up on purchasing a new NVIDIA or AMD graphics card at launch or even months after launch at MSRP. The high demand and chip shortages have made that a near impossibility. Of course, we'll be interested to see if Intel encounters the same type of supply problems when it launches DG2 (Xe-HPG) next year, but what we're hoping for is a tech miracle that will magically get chip production back on a steady track across all sectors.
