AMD inexplicably threw bone scalpers with a limited edition “Midnight Black” GPU

Because the world desperately needed another GPU that people couldn’t actually buy, AMD decided to release a limited edition Midnight Black version of its Radeon RX 6800 XT early Wednesday morning, where it sold out before most people even saw it. that the card is there.

You may be thinking, “Why would you release a limited version of something that’s actually a collector’s item, even without a new coat of paint?” (AMD’s recent GPUs are even rarer than Nvidia’s, although both currently run two to three times the retail price on eBay.)

Or maybe you’re thinking, “When exactly did AMD announce a new GPU?” I don’t remember that. “This is because the company has not officially announced it: according to VideoCardz, AMD quietly told its AMD Red Team community base via email around midnight that they had to follow the card at 6 a.m. PT, a message that, to put it mildly, was no secret.

Personally, I’m just wondering: If AMD really wanted to put video cards in the hands of its fans, why not check their emails, or email unique, non-transferable passwords, or hand them out, or do something else to insert them on the same website where bots, scalpers and everyone else already know how to search – a website that some people’s browser is set to refresh all day?

There appears to have been a special “Red Team link”, but a bunch of potential buyers said it didn’t work – while several others said they were able to buy one on the store’s homepage by clicking the refresh button or using a direct Javascript path to mislead the website.

There are potential solutions to these problems, but the gaming industry does not seem particularly interested in finding them. Still, we need to give AMD credit for its sale at an initial retail price of $ 649, instead of charging more.

It is not clear how many Midnight Black cards were produced; during the press, two buyers were trying to find their confirmed orders on eBay, while a third had pulled out his list due to an unspecified error.

AMD tells On the edge “Continues to focus on providing the latest Radeon graphics cards to as many SEP gamers as possible” and acknowledges the brief appearance of the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT Midnight Black as part of this.

“We continue to make reference cards available on AMD.com and will continue to fill the offering in the foreseeable future,” says the company, something it failed to do the last time I wrote about such a statement. Since then, however, AMD has shipped (very briefly) deliveries of GPUs at least three times that I know of.