AMD RDNA 3 GPUs could be delayed – but don’t panic

AMD’s RDNA 3 graphics card might go on sale in the first week of December, if the latest from the rumor mill turns out to be on the money.

This one comes from regular contributor to GPU spillage on Twitter, Greymon55, who believes that the original on-sale date has been pushed back by about week, meaning the next-gen RX 7000 graphics cards will launch between December 1 and December 5.

As to the cause of the purported delay, a denizen of Twitter asked whether there could be issues with the power connector (and adapter), to which Greymon replied with an assurance that there are “no hardware issues involved”, thankfully.

The power adapter situation has been an area some folks have got paranoid around since Nvidia’s RTX 4090 has been involved in reported incidents of cables melting (possibly due to the adapter not being seated properly in the port of the graphics card).

However, there’s no need to worry that AMD has taken the same route as Nvidia for its flagship RDNA 3 adapter, as Team Red’s Scott Herkelman already confirmed that the company won’t be doing that. We don’t know what its solution will be yet, mind, on the connector front; time will tell. (Presumably a 3 x 8-pin setup for the flagship, or that seems most likely).

Analysis: Rumors align around RDNA 3 hitting shelves in December

Of course, take all this with the usual dose of seasoning that should be applied to anything spinning out of the ever-churning hardware rumor mill.

What’s interesting here, though, is that we’ve already heard that the on-sale date will be December from another source of leaks. That would be Enthusiastic Citizen who has previously asserted that RDNA 3 GPUs would be out in the second half of December – so Greymon’s sources are at least indicating things should happen sooner than that (at least a week and a half sooner, in fact).

Either way, it appears to be the case that we’ll be waiting until December before we can actually buy an RX 7000 graphics card (the RX 7900 XT and 7800 XT are expected to be the first products out of the gate). Remember, that’s the on-shelf date as opposed to the initial launch, with the latter reveal taking place very soon – on November 3, in fact.

At least we’ll know more about what RDNA 3 is packing next week, and we can’t wait to find out how competitive the range is shaping up to be in comparison to Nvidia’s RTX 4090 (and RTX 4080 for that matter, though the latter still isn’t out yet). Some chatter from the grapevine of late has been stoking the idea that RX 7000 GPUs will be faster than expected (compared to past performance rumors).