Last-minute AMD RX 9070 XT stock rumors are making me hopeful for a much better launch than Nvidia’s RTX 5000 GPUs – with just one snag

• A UK retailer has a lot of stock of RDNA 4 GPUs ready for launch, likely reflecting the wider global picture for availability
• That includes 4,000+ models, half of which are Sapphire graphics cards
• While the MSRPs are nicely pitched in the UK, which is encouraging, this won’t hold – it’s just for an initial few hundred models (subsidized by AMD)

AMD’s RX 9070 XT goes on sale later today and there are more rumors about stock levels being relatively robust – and certainly way exceeding what Nvidia has managed to muster with its RTX 5000 GPUs.

Overclockers UK (OCUK) is a major retailer in that country and has a lot of RX 9070 XT models in stock, particularly of the Sapphire Pulse model.

Indeed, Adrian Thompson, who is global senior VP of marketing at Sapphire, teased a photo of OCUK’s warehouse on X, as you can see above, featuring a ‘Borg Cube’ built from Sapphire Pulse RX 9070 XT GPUs.

And to the doubters on X, as flagged by VideoCardz, OCUK actually replied to confirm that this is a solid cube of graphics cards (meaning the middle isn’t hollow, there are boxes all the way through), and that it has over 1,000 units of just this one Sapphire model.

The retailer notes: “In fact we have so much stock we could build an armada of Borg Cubes pretty much out of every model we have and from all brands, we have several thousand cards in stock spanning across Sapphire, PowerColor and ASRock all of which have 1,000+ in stock of each brand.”

Further on in that thread, OCUK confirms that it has about 2,000 units of RDNA 4 GPUs from Sapphire in stock, along with 1,000 from both PowerColor and ASRock, so that’s around 4,000+ for just one UK retailer. I assume that’s across both RX 9070 XT and vanilla 9070 models.

The scenario expected is that this will be enough to go around, and the retailer believes “stock will be fine for a few days,” so this should not be a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it graphics card launch.

There’s even better news in that the MSRPs are lower than I expected too, and the mentioned Sapphire Pulse model of the RX 9070 XT is initially listed (at the time of writing, a few hours before launch) at £570. The RX 9070 starts from £525 with the entry-level graphics cards, too, so this is very promising – but there’s a catch.

OCUK observes that this MSRP price will only hold for the first few hundred units of each board sold, and that: “MSRP is capped quantity of a few hundred, so prices will jump once those are sold through.”

Analysis: Plentiful stock, but expect MSRP boards to disappear quickly

On the whole, this is good news for availability, and the prospect that AMD’s RX 9070 models are not going to immediately sell out. And yes, this might be only a single UK retailer, but it likely reflects wider availability to a large extent – rumors thus far have indicated this is indeed the case.

We’ve heard that RDNA 4 graphics cards will have something like a normal quantity of launch units from various sources now, so the overall picture is hopeful. Perhaps it will indeed be the case that, as suggested here, AMD’s RX 9070 models won’t immediately sell out, as Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs most certainly have – and many more punters will get a chance to buy these products.

At what price, though, is the question, and you may be wondering: how come OCUK is only selling the first few hundred boards at MSRP? It’s because AMD will be giving retailers a discount on buying an initial quantity of GPUs, to effectively help ensure that there’s some stock at the official MSRP come launch time. Remember, there are no reference RX 9070 graphics cards being made by AMD itself, that are guaranteed to be at MSRP, so consumers are entirely reliant on third-party pricing here. (In short, this is Team Red’s way of guaranteeing some MSRP stock).

For the RX 9070 XT, I was expecting an asking price of close to £600 in the UK, so the fact that the £570 MSRP price tag is going to rise after an initial quantity of GPUs has sold through is not really a surprise. It’ll likely end up at £600, or maybe even a bit higher given OCUK’s use of the word ‘jump’ which doesn’t sound like a trivial increase.

As for the RTX 5070, which went on sale yesterday, that graphics card panned out just as the gloomy rumors of limited stock predicted – it sold out in a flash. Even Nvidia itself has delayed its Founders Edition, which missed the on-sale date of yesterday, March 5, and now won’t be arriving until later in the month.

OCUK didn’t get any RTX 5070 stock at all before the launch, and only expected some “small quantities of limited SKUs” to arrive on the actual on-sale day. All in all, it seems pretty hopeless for would-be RTX 5070 buyers, though as we point out in our review – this isn’t a great graphics card, anyway.

Mind you, that very fact could stoke AMD’s RX 9070 sales – we loved the RX 9070 XT, as you may have seen – which means that even a relatively solid allocation of supply could sell out quicker than expected.

Anyhow, there’ll be a lot of eyes on this RDNA 4 launch, which is now imminent. If you’re hoping to bag one of these new graphics cards, check out our guide that highlights the best places to buy AMD RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 GPUs (which certainly includes Overclockers, for those in the UK).

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