AMD Radeon VII Finally Available in India for Rs. 64,500 ($921)

AMD launched its Radeon VII graphics card back on 7th Feb in the first quarter of 2019. We had earlier reported that the stocks for the world’s first 7nm GPU were severely limited and the card was not available in India at all. It seems like three months post-launch, AMD has finally brought its GPU shortages under control. The Sapphire Radeon VII is now available in India for a retail price of Rs. 64,500 or $921. Those of you from the US or Europe might find this price absurd, it’s really not. NVIDIA’s competing RTX card, the GeForce RTX 2080 (also globally priced at $699) starts at Rs. 60,500 here in India. That’s $864. Not much of a difference really.

To be fair, I was expecting it to cost somewhere between 65K to 70K. Granted, it’s not a whole not lesser than that, but it’s still priced quite competitively. However, this isn’t the pricing AMD is known for. If you check the global Amazon or Newegg stores, you’ll find the Radeon VII for $650, a good 50 dollars less than the RTX 2080, and rightly so since the card is marginally slower than NVIDIA’s Turing competitor, and lacks the RTX features such as ray tracing and DLSS.

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Let’s have a look at the prices of the various board partner models of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080. The best online stores in the country are MDComputers, Vedant Computers, and PrimeAGB. The first two are selling the Galax and Inno3D versions of the RTX 2080 for Rs. 60,500 while at Prime, the former is priced at 62,000. In case, you don’t find these two brands trustworthy, then you can also have a look at the Zotac Spectra Lighting (dual-fan) variant which is priced at 62K at MD. The other two retailers have the rest of the board partner cards starting from 64 and 66K, respectively.

This price may be decent, but it’s still hard for me to recommend the Sapphire Radeon VII over the GeForce RTX 2080 which is slightly faster and cheaper by four thousand bucks. You can buy a water-block and a GPU bracket for that much and switch to liquid cooling over the crappy blower fan heatsink. Regardless, it’s good to see AMD staying true to its word and making its 7nm Radeon VII graphics card available via multiple retailers in India.

It’s not a bad purchase by any means, but at the same time, it’s not a smart one either. If you don’t want the cheaper board partner variants of the 2080 and would rather opt for the more expensive Gigabyte or Zotac cards (starting at 66K), then I’d say that the Radeon VII is a fairly viable option.

PS: In case you’re wondering why there’s only one board partner for the Radeon VII, then let me remind you that even if there were multiple, their heatsinks and design would be the same as all of AMD’s partners are selling the same model, just in different packaging.

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