First there was the accidental confirmation of AMD's new Radeon R9 390X, the re-brand version of 290X by its partner XFX. And now there's the early release of AMD's Radeon 300 series, which comprise of R9 390X, R9 380, R7 370 or R7 360, at BestBuy a few days before its scheduled launching date.
On June 16, AMD will launch its Radeon 300 series including its Fiji flagships, Fury and Fury X, as named internally. Yet BestBuy seemed to have not received the memo as it has already started selling the cards with hefty premiums attached.
All the aforementioned cards can be bought directly from the retailer with a markup price that is higher than their MSRP. For instance, the R7 360 which has an MSRP of $107 is being sold at the retailer for $150, while the Radeon R9 390 that has an MSRP of $329 is being sold for $369.
This pricing method is also applied to other products, such as $349 GTX 970 SSC which is being sold for $379. A more competitive price can be expected from BestBuy and other retailers of AMD Radeon cards when these products are officially launched.
While the R9 390X doubles up the storage capacity of 290X with 8GB, it isn't one of AMD's new Fiji flagships. According to Digital trends, "Fiji uses the new High Bandwidth Memory which, as time of its release, will be restricted to a maximum of 4GB."
In a report by Tweaktown, there will be two classifications of new graphics cards for this generation wherein both will have 4GB of HGM memory. Digital Trends reported the same, adding that the rest in the AMD Radeon 300 series will be repackaged hardware from two years before. That includes the R9 390X.
So despite the celebration of the new type of GPU memory it has created, many actually sees this re-branding strategy a blow to fans of the chip maker. That's not to mention that AMD has not released a truly revolutionary graphic chip since 2011.
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