Fake MSRP | GamersNexus

But then we received these messages from Newegg canceling our orders, and it turns out, so did literally hundreds of other people.

When we tried to buy GPUs at MSRP from Amazon, we were met with this: 

We did the only rational thing that well-adjusted adults would do: We spent two days obsessively gathering information about prices of GPUs for playing video games.

Only 12 of 51 models that we catalogued across 4 retailers were at MSRP in the US. Of the remaining 39, 5 were 42% over MSRP and 16 were 30-40% over MSRP, which is worse than we’ve seen in most prior GPU launches, except for the 50-series. 

In some ways, it’s a “normal” launch: There are always models over MSRP. That’s normal. But it felt bad this time because of just how many were so far over MSRP. But the good news is that it wasn’t a paper launch: More like a highly compressed cellulose arboreal composite launch…

But Micro Center enjoyers had a different experience:

We noticed that a Micro Center had 45% of its total inventory at MSRP.

And that seems like a much better distribution of MSRP cards than what was experienced by those of you who live in a small place allegedly called “the rest of the world.” We’re told it’s a nice place to vacation.

Today, we’re digging through the evidence we’ve collected to better understand the AMD RX 9070 (read our review) launch and put some context to the absurdity.

“Fake MSRP” & Price Tracking

We prepared this table of RX 9070 XT (read our review) prices through a combination of data from TrackaLacker and some manual data collection. It shows the card model, retailer, original and updated price (if applicable), how much the price changed, and how much the price is elevated over the base MSRP of $600. Because of the way Amazon aggressively de-lists and removes prices, anything from Amazon is just what we came across in a spot check on the morning of launch. Pricing data may change by the time we publish due to a fluid market.

The average price of all 9070 XT models, ignoring quantity, is $739, or $139 higher than AMD’s base $600 MSRP. With all cards included, that makes the average increase over MSRP 23% by model – with non-MSRP occupying a range from 20% over to a terribly bad 42% over, which is completely insane. Please do not spend that much more for one of these cards. Only 12 of the 51 listings we cataloged were actually at MSRP.

XFX’s Mercury 9070 XTs were the worst, with the Magnetic Air OC variant taking the top spots along with the PowerColor Red Devil Limited Edition at Micro Center. Expressed as an average, XFX’s 9070 XT models all combined were 29% over MSRP. The ASUS TUF cards fill in next at 33% over MSRP. ASRock generally stayed the closest to MSRP, with its cards coming to an average of 11% over MSRP. 

Interestingly, Best Buy and B&H show price reductions across a few listings – all of which had extremely elevated initial prices. The worst was the ASUS TUF at B&H for $1,100, later reduced to $800. B&H might be able to argue these were placeholder prices since it’s only selling these GPUs via waiting list, but we can’t be certain.

Best Buy’s situation was similar, with an initial listing price of $950 for the Gigabyte AORUS ELITE, which later dropped to $760. This may coincide with the lime-limited “deal” pricing we saw from Best Buy initially on launch morning, whose “deal” text was later removed. Our understanding is that AMD had a conversation with Best Buy after seeing this, causing the retailer to remove what appeared to insinuate that the launch price was a limited time and that it’d climb later.

RX 9070 Price Table

Now we’ll move on to the RX 9070 non-XTs. MSRP is supposed to be $550 for these, which we maintain is $50 too high and intentionally creates an upsell. 

The good news is that it’s not $550. The bad news is that it’s more.

The average price of all listings is $628, which is $78 higher than the base MSRP of $550, or an average of 14% over. 13 of the 38 cards we gathered info on were at that base MSRP – a better ratio than the XTs. The average increase over MSRP for all 9070s shown here is 14%, with the raised price models in a range from 13% at the low-end for the PowerColor Hellhound at Micro Center, up to the Sapphire NITRO+ at a 31% increase over base price, which was also at Micro Center.

That puts the most expensive 9070 we found at $720, which is obviously atrociously bad. Nobody should pay even close to that for one of these cards. 

It’s actually the same price as the ASUS 9070 XT Prime OC at Newegg. At those prices, you’d be better off buying a used NVIDIA GPU on eBay at those prices.

In fact, every single 9070 that wasn’t MSRP was actually more expensive than MSRP 9070 XTs. That’s also insane, and might be another piece of evidence pointing to AMD dropping the MSRP of both of these GPUs at the last moment.

Average increase per board partner is a lot closer for the non-XTs by percentage, to the point that it’s not worthwhile to get into the specific numbers. ASUS was technically the worst.

Overall, adding all the 9070 XTs and 9070s together, the average percent increase over MSRP is 19%. We don’t know whether that’s normal or not for AMD since this is the first time we’ve gathered that data for AMD, but we’ll bring up a point from our NVIDIA “Fake Prices” piece. 

The ASUS RTX 4090 Strix – regarded as the most expensive “normal” 4090 – sold for 25% over MSRP. That’s a high-end GPU with a bunch of unnecessary, expensive bells-and-whistles from a company that largely sells its brand image. Tons of these AMD 9070 XTs (and some non-XT) are way across that percentage threshold, again including some at 42% over MSRP. That’s a bigger price hike than the Strix 4090. 

In this case, modern midrange GPU price bloat continues, even if it’s not as high as NVIDIA’s 5070 Ti class of GPUs.

According to this detailed product listing sheet from the Dallas Microcenter, which is the only such one we were able to find, we observed 421 out of 920 cards, or roughly 46%, were sold at MSRP. More specifically, 319 of the 705 9070 XTs and 102 out of 215 9070s were listed with MSRP. This accounts for about 45.25% of 9070 XTs and nearly 47.5% for the non-XTs.

As seen in this chart we put together, each manufacturer listed had at least one MSRP card for both variants of the GPU. In these listings, excluding MSRP models, percent over MSRP ranged from 12.73% on the low end to 41.67% on the high end.

It’s normal for AIB partners to charge more than baseline MSRP. They tack-on extra features, they have quality of life options like extra VBIOS, “hellstones,” apparently, and quieter cooling.

What isn’t normal is the amount of upcharge we’re seeing this generation for both NVIDIA and AMD. Both companies’ partners have totally lost the plot, but AMD’s in particular feels bad because it marketed itself as the savior of gaming at affordable prices. 

We dug back through decade-old reviews from our own publication, TechPowerUp, Tom’s Hardware, Anandtech, and others. We took prices from launch day of the GTX 1080 Ti and RX 5700 XT (read our review) GPUs to compare their average price increases over baseline MSRP. Remember: There are multiple MSRPs. There’s the base price from AMD or NVIDIA, but then the MSRP for each individual model. What we’re proving is that the cost increase in partner MSRP over baseline has gotten way worse.

Here’s the GOATed GTX 1080 Ti. We reviewed a lot of these. As you remember, the 9070 XT had multiple cards at 42% over MSRP. The GTX 1080 Ti KINGPIN was the only card at 42% over MSRP, technically about 43%, and that’s a specialized XOC card. Those are basically extinct today. Cards of that quality don’t exist anymore.

The next highest is the Lightning Z, which was a competing card to the KP and was 24% over MSRP. In fact, most of the cards of that era were about 7% to 10% over MSRP, including some of the best ones. The EVGA 1080 Ti FTW3 (watch our review) and SC2 (watch our review) were both excellent cards. The 1080 Ti Armor (watch our review) was a basic 1080 Ti for MSRP, but could be converted into an excellent water-cooled card with its reference PCB.

This chart is hugely different from what we just saw in the 9070 and 50-series launches. Partners have gotten out of control.

Here’s the 5700 XT. The 5700 XT had two prices. The first was $450, but after it jebaited itself, it came down to $400 pre-launch. Using the $400 price as the reference since that was launch pricing, the uplift for the cards we found via TechPowerUp and our own prior GN reviews ranged from 3% to 20% increased over MSRP. The $480 Taichi OC+ was among the highest.

There are models we didn’t list for each, but this cross-section gives you cards from all over each stack.

We are confident that data supports the delta against MSRP increasing with time. That means AMD and NVIDIA share blame with the partners for setting possibly unrealistic targets. 

Tracking Stock

We’ll come back to the fake MSRP discussion in a minute. First, it’d help to have perspective on volume and if this was a “paper launch” like NVIDIA’s.

Micro Center can be sort of a microcosm for our inventory report: It’s just one chain and it’s hyper localized, but because we have data for its RTX 50 launch, we can more easily get a like-for-like comparison perspective on AMD’s. 

By crawling through web posts and cross-referencing them, we were able to conclude that Micro Center had nearly 12,000 known cards in stock (excluding a few stores we couldn’t find data for). 

For reference, this spreadsheet circulated on Reddit after users tallied the Micro Center inventories for the 50-series launch day. The Madison Heights and Sterling Heights stores are actually the same, so subtracting those 10 duplicate entry units from the 5090s and 91 units from the 5080s (read our review), we end up with 223x RTX 5090s and 2,302 RTX 5080s for launch day. 

Overclockers UK also posted some numbers. Gibbo from OC UK posted this:

“We do have several deliveries due today and next week, so we might have more available later. We have sold around 5000 units now, warehouse is working very hard to get them all shipped out today.”

That puts us at 12,000 units for a localized store in the US and 5,000 units for a UK-based store. Speaking with someone at AMD off-record, GN learned that AMD and its partners shipped “tens of thousands” of units to the North American market alone, with most of those being 9070 XT GPUs.

The break-out is more interesting: We don’t have the break-out for each store of the 9070 vs. 9070 XT quantities, but of the 11,657 total tallied, we were able to identify the model of 2,528 of them. The split of these is about 22% 9070 non-XT to 78% 9070 XT. 

The RX 9070 is a Decoy Product

We think this supports the theory that AMD doesn’t actually want to sell the RX 9070 GPUs. We think that’s a model designed to create an upsell to the 9070 XT, like a decoy product. 

AMD did this with the 7900 XT and 7900 XTX (at $900 and $1000), with that difference just months later becoming about $200. Within a year, the difference was at times $250.

To us, it doesn’t matter why AMD does this. We don’t care about AMD’s perspective. All we care about is the consumer perspective. And for the consumer, the reason a company might upsell them is irrelevant — all they know is they’re getting upsold. Maybe the yields are so good on the XT that they have to fuse products off to even create a non-XT. But if that’s the argument, then they might as well drop the price for the goodwill and price accessibility since there aren’t that many anyway — but then the 9070 wouldn’t serve what we assume is its purpose, which is to purely function as a tool to create an upsell to a 9070 XT.

System Integrator Inventory

We next checked with several system integrators we know. They have a very different perspective on the success of AMD’s launch than retailers for DIY.

The first SI we spoke to sold 50 systems with 9070 XTs and 20 systems with 9070s on launch day. That SI had just over 1,000 systems with RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT cards available for purchase. That’s about 7% of the built systems that were sold on launch day. The SI told us that this was “better than expected” as compared to AMD’s previous launches.

For perspective, that same SI previously told us that they had 20 units of RTX 5090 GPU (read our review) on launch day and that they sold out in about 2-4 minutes. There may be some influence from the wider market there: As users couldn’t buy retail DIY cards, they may have resorted to pre-built machines.

Another SI told us that they sold 7 units of 100 available on launch day. Interestingly, that’s also 7% — so that’s two very differently sized system integrators at the same sell-through of inventory. The second SI sold about 30 units of RTX 5090 systems on launch day, which was 100% of availability.

It was interesting to gain the perspective of these companies. For the first, it was a better launch than expected — but only in the context of AMD. For the second, the launch was viewed almost as a dud. In both situations, the average non-enthusiast “video game enjoyer” doesn’t buy AMD, at least in pre-built PCs.

AMD has to make inroads there eventually. For it to do that, it needs unshakeable goodwill in the enthusiast DIY segment so that those people become their evangelists.

Between the two SIs we spoke with, one received 50.5x more AMD GPUs than it received NVIDIA cards on day one, yet it made less revenue from them. The other received about 100x more since they’d only received a single 5090 initially, though they got another 20 or so on launch day, so that’d still put it at 5x more. 

Using Micro Center only as another control, they received 4 times as many RX 9000 series cards as RTX 5000 series cards.

By all accounts, this is not a “paper launch” in the way the RTX 5000 series was. This appears to be more normal, in that there was a good amount of supply, just not enough to satisfy initial demand. 

So the supply wasn’t fake. Now we question whether the “MSRP” is fake.

Retailers Claiming “Temporary Price”

Since it seems that AMD panicked when it caught wind of NVIDIA’s January announcements, we can continue the speculation that it never planned to sell the cards at these prices. If AMD is subsidizing partners, distributors, and retailers to hit the lower-than-expected price, then the new concern becomes whether the announced price is “temporary.”

Found via VideoCardz, at least three distributors have publicly stated that MSRP will only apply to the first shipment of cards.

Swedish retailer Inet.se announced in a machine translated post:

“Prices apply only to the first delivery of the respective model. We have now been told how the recommended prices, so-called MSRP prices, work for the launch of the AMD Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT. We must not say exact prices for the release, but simply explaining they will apply to a limited number of cards.”

The company clarified (which has also been machine translated):

“Our second delivery from PowerColor is already waiting, and we can not offer it at MSRP prices. This means that we will first sell the Reaper models at MSRP price and the stock balance will tick down as usual until the first delivery is sold out. Then, with a certain delay, the stock will be filled with new cards and we will then release the Reaper cards for order again – but then not at MSRP price.

“If you get through an order with MSRP price even if the cards are sold out, we will of course give you that price, but we unfortunately have no opportunities to continue selling cards at MSRP price after the first deliveries are sold out.”

Retailer OCUK, which is part of the CaseKing family, affirmed this in its forum post:

“MSRP is capped quantity of a few hundred, so prices will jump once those are sold through.”

Another UK retailer, eBuyer, reportedly cancelled pre-orders that were processed at MSRP after it sold out of the first delivery of cards. They explained to an affected customer:

“Unfortunately, we were only allocated a limited number of units at the price offered by AMD, and we won’t be receiving any additional stock at this price. As you can imagine, this launch has been extremely popular, and we have now sold out at that price. As a result of this, your pre order has been cancelled, and any payments have been reversed.”

A separate eBuyer customer claimed he checked out at £569.99 but the price increased to £664.98 when processing his payment. 

eBuyer repeated its previous statement explaining the finite number of MSRP cards and added, “once these were sold we did have to sell these are normal cost [sic].” This would seem to indicate that it’s not simply from taxes being added after the fact.

But AMD has responded. AMD emailed us a statement from Frank Azor, whom you may remember from a previous AMD launch where he bet customers that, unlike its competition, he’d have stock at launch. He bet $10. He lost the bet. We’re not sure if he ever paid it out. 

Just like when AMD’s other now-former executive claimed — we think lied — about AMD dropping GPU prices after panicking at NVIDIA’s launch as some sort of 6D chess grand jebaiting strategy, AMD has continually used NVIDIA and riled-up a tribal mentality as a shield for its own incompetence.

Emailed to us, Frank Azor said this:

“It is inaccurate that $549/$599 MSRP is launch-only pricing. We expect cards to be available from multiple vendors at $549/$599 (excluding region specific tariffs and/or taxes) based on the work we have done with our AIB partners, and more are coming.  At the same time, the AIBs have different premium configurations at higher price points and those will also continue.”

Speaking with insiders, we learned that AMD is “enabling” partners to continue this pricing. When we asked what “enabling” means here, we were told that AMD is working to lower cost to partners either through direct price reductions or through rebates and marketing development fund, or MDF. MDF is money that partners can use to spend on AMD-approved advertising efforts. If you see ads pop-up on YouTube for AMD’s GPU partners at some point, it’s likely that money went from AMD itself and through the partner to trade for artificial suppression of the GPU price.

But based on the statement they sent to the media, it’s still unclear whether cards for MSRP can be expected or not going forward. The statements from distributors and AMD directly contradict one another. AMD can certainly say “launch-only pricing” is inaccurate, but the fact of the matter is the sellers previously mentioned have increased prices. 

If AMD really wanted to enforce its MSRP, it could technically not distribute to retailers who don’t honor the price, but that seems unlikely. It doesn’t matter how much AMD claims pricing wasn’t launch-only: By not offering its own reference model for sale as NVIDIA does, it is an accomplice to the murder of its launch price. It has allowed partners to drift from the baseline because they’re all doing it, and without AMD there to undercut them, there’s no anchor to hold it back down. There are pros and cons to this: On the upside, AMD can avoid an EVGA departure situation. On the downside, partners can run wild, and AMD absolutely shares some of that blame. If AMD doesn’t control the final price because it doesn’t sell the final product, it can’t truly guarantee the price it advertised. 

For all the sh*t NVIDIA gets, it does have this aspect of things together. It is controlling, overbearing, and levers its position to enforce strict requirements. Even if that’s often a bad thing, it can also work in favor of consumers.

Non-US Market Gets Screwed

We’re based in the US and are most familiar with that market, so that’s what we’ve looked at so far. But from reading comments from viewers internationally, it’s become clear that you all got screwed the most.

We’ve collected reports from 16 different countries outside of the US, all sharing a similar sentiment of MSRP cards evaporating in seconds to minutes.

A user from Europe reported, “In Europe the ‘MSRP’ cards were all gone within two minutes at most.” 

One from Australia says,  “By the time the page loaded, it was out of stock.”  

Another EU resident expresses, “Gone within 5 minutes.” 

A Polish user describes,  “Not a single card was MSRP.” And the list goes on.

Various users reported Netherlands retailer Megekko continuously increased prices throughout the launch.

One user explains, “At 15.00 their website crashed, and megekko kept on raising the prices, if im correct they raised the price 3 times in total. Now it costs 1100euro for a 9070xt that has 600dollar msrp.”

Another states, “Bought one from megekko for 930€ and was ‘sold out’ 3 seconds later, only to come back fully in stock but suddenly ANOTHER 100€ added.”

A third user adds that the retailer even increased 7900 XTX pricing. 

Because we don’t have actual numbers here, we can’t make any definitive claims. That being said, these reports seem to suggest that non-US distributors, excluding OCUK, didn’t receive as much stock as those in the US did. Specifically, stock being sold at MSRP. Interestingly, this is with new tariffs in the US.

Conclusion

Based on our research, it does appear as if the cost increase in partner models has increased over time. Partners are shipping cards at a percent price higher than baseline MSRP that is greater than what they’ve done historically in the past from what we’ve briefly looked at thus far. 

This might indicate that launch MSRPs might be for show. We think the situation boils down to greed. If we’re being charitable to partners in that they are raising prices just to survive the low margins, then the MSRPs are bull****. 

When we covered EVGA’s GPUs, we learned that the company was just making $4 per card, so their margin was functionally zero. When NVIDIA let off the pressure to hit certain baseline prices, EVGA would stop selling these lower-margin cards to push pricier models that yielded higher margins. This is something we can’t fault them for given the low margin they had to contend with. 

The pricing situation seems to have gotten worse. The argument that the tariffs are behind this is kind of BS because other countries outside of the US are getting screwed even more. In addition, these cards have been stockpiled in the US before the tariffs went into effect. Tariffs will have an effect, but we don’t buy it when you look at the total situation across both AMD and NVIDIA over the last 2 launches. We’re seeing a price creep due to companies realizing they can make more money on video cards, especially since they realize people will pay for it. The end result is that people get screwed. The delta against baseline MSRP is widening.

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