AMD’s RX 7700 XT drops in price substantially, becoming a mid-range GPU that makes sense compared to the 7800 XT
AMD’s RX 7700 XT has dropped to new pricing lows over in the US, making this mid-range GPU a tempting proposition.
As you may have seen, just last week the RX 7700 XT was treated to an official price cut by AMD, with Team Red dropping the MSRP in the US by 7%, down to $419.
Tom’s Hardware spotted that there are now more RX 7700 XT GPUs down at that level on Amazon.com and Newegg, which is good news – while AMD can recommend a price, its third-party card-making partners don’t necessarily have to follow that guidance. (And there is no reference board made by AMD in the case of this GPU).
But it seems those card vendors are doing just that, and indeed looking at Newegg right now, the 7700 XT has sunk below that new MSRP.
There’s a Sapphire Pulse RX 7700 XT down to $419, but with a $10 off promo code at checkout, it’s now $409, a real bargain for this graphics card.
That one is still in stock – at least at the time of writing – although there’s another model with the same deal, a $10 off discount code making it $409, but it’s run dry sadly. That’s the ASRock Challenger spin on the 7700 XT, which you can back-order if you wish (or it might even come back in stock by the time you read this).
It’s a good sign that two of these GPUs are now barely over $400 in the US, and just maybe we’ll see pricing coming down further – and proportionate reductions in other regions outside the US, too. We are seeing some movement in the UK, for example, like a Gigabyte Gaming 7700 XT down at £420 at Overclockers, but that’s out of stock currently, unfortunately.
Analysis: RX 7700 XT makes more sense at this price
This is a good graphics card and a sterling 1440p performer, but as we point out in our RX 7700 XT review, the main problem is the pricing. Or was the pricing, rather, as with the cost of the GPU now having been reduced nicely (at least in the US), it makes a lot more sense.
The gap between the RX 7700 XT and 7800 XT didn’t really line up before – with the latter only being $50 more expensive, it was a no-brainer unless that extra expenditure broke your budget.
However, on Newegg now the cheapest 7800 XT is $500, so the 7700 XT is almost a hundred bucks under that, where it looks like a good value proposition – and maybe it’ll be sneaking onto our list of the best graphics cards soon, at this rate. And that most definitely wasn’t a possibility at the launch of the 7700 XT.
All that noted, if you’re looking at a mid-range GPU from AMD, and can wait, it might be prudent to do so. After all, RDNA 4 is going to top out at the mid-range, if the rumor mill is right – and those graphics cards are likely to really go for the throat in terms of value proposition, as this will likely be AMD’s best way of looking good in the face of Nvidia’s rival next-gen GPUs.
The RTX 5090 could arrive as early as Q3 2024 perhaps – though Q4 is more likely – and is purportedly going to be a massive leap in performance that’ll truly blow away anything Team Red has. So, AMD’s obvious counterattack could be on pricing in the middle of the pack, to save its public perception in terms of starting to look too far behind the competition.
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