As spotted by Tom’s Hardware, German retail giant Mindfactory has a PowerColor AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT listed for €169 including VAT (at the time of writing), 35% less than its usual €229 MSRP. That new price converts directly to $189, and once Germany’s 19% sales tax is removed, the figure drops to $159. There’s also a dual-fan Fighter model for ten euros more. A quick look on Newegg shows two AMD Radeon 6500 XT cards for sale: a $253 XFX model and a $224 Asrock card, both of them above the $200 MSRP. If Mindfactory’s discount was applied to the US MSRP, the RDNA 2 product would be selling for around $130. Mindfactory actually started selling the Radeon RX 6500 XT beneath MSRP over three weeks ago, but it has since lowered the previous €199 price down to €169. While the GPU market in Germany can reflect current or upcoming trends, the big caveat here concerns the card in question. We hated the Radeon RX 6500 XT—our own Steve Walton called it the worst GPU release he could remember. Its PCIe x4 limitation, 4GB of VRAM, and lack of hardware encoding helped it to an abysmal score of just 20, explaining why it alone under MSRP. However, there has been a slew of reports recently indicating that the chip shortage-induced graphics card crisis has turned a corner: cards recently hit their lowest prices in Germany since the start of 2021, Nvidia’s and AMD’s AIB partners are running promotions on their GPUs, and shipments increased in the fourth quarter of last year. All of which suggest obscene prices and low availability could be coming to an end, reducing the need for people to steal them from warehouses.
