Only A Few Select AMD Board Partners Have Radeon RX 7900 Custom Designs Ready For Launch Day

AMD is set to present the newest Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards on December 13. Shortly after that, AMD board partners were said to release each of their custom card designs. Now, it is not becoming a case of "should" release, but "could" release at the presented timeframe.

AMD to release flagship Radeon RX 7900 series GPU, delaying AIBs as far back as two weeks

With NVIDIA's launch, the playing field was different. We saw some retailers selling or displaying cards before the GeForce RTX 4090 street date launch. AMD's partners, however, appear to be running into a roadblock for launch.

The only AMD partners publicly announcing their custom designs are Sapphire, PowerColor, and ASUS. Sapphire teased the RX 7900 NITRO graphics cards yesterday, PowerColor revealed its custom Red Devil version four days ago, and ASUS with its TUF series at the beginning of the month.

AMD revealed pricing and release date in the following statement during the unveiling:

AMD Radeon RX 7900 Series graphics cards are expected to be available from AMD.com beginning December 13, 2022, and from leading board partners including ASRock, ASUS, Biostar, Gigabyte, MSI, PowerColor, Sapphire, Vastarmor, XFX and Yeston beginning mid-December. The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX has an SEP of $999 USD, while the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT has an SEP of $899 USD.

— AMD

From HardwareLuxx's editor, Andreas Schilling on Twitter, this may be worse than initially anticipated.

„Could“ … This is the feedback I got:

A: We assume that the partner cards will start a bit later than the MBA cards.

B: Unfortunately, we do not have any information yet.

C: There will be a preview on December 13, but we do not yet know when exactly we will have the cards. https://t.co/GIGR8j8hk4

— Andreas Schilling 🇺🇦 (@aschilling) November 24, 2022

Additionally, the current companies' announcements do not reveal critical specifications, such as power consumption levels, base and boost clock speeds, etc. Only three AIBs have so far revealed that they are working on the cards and none of them have revealed the full specs or their designs yet while NVIDIA's AIB had full specs, designs, and even prices appeared on the same day as the RTX 40 series unveil.

To capitalize on sales, AMD might want to ensure that reference cards are sold before custom AIB partner graphics cards. This could be mainly part of the flagship AMD models stacked against the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 GPU. AMD's dramatic cost difference from NVIDIA could sway buyers to consider its company above the competition. Once the initial AMD batch of reference cards has been on the marketplace to garner those sales, then the AIB partners, who are rumored to have more expensive options coming soon, will be allowed to receive sales of GPUs, but not to the level that AMD is anticipating.

We reported that AMD might have a launch supply better than NVIDIA's RTX 40 series but it looks like the red team really wants users to have a taste of their reference designs first. It's definitely going to be a heated December with NVIDIA and AMD both battling out in the high-end GPU space. AMD will begin selling the Radeon RX 7900 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX on December 13, 2022, for $899 and $999, respectively.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 Series "Official" Specifications:

News Sources: VideoCardz, Andreas Schilling (@aschilling on Twitter)