AMD’s Radeon 5500 XT: Australian Price And Release Date

While gamers are still waiting for the RTX 2080 Ti to get a proper challenger, AMD’s been busy with the middle tier of the GPU stack. A high-end card for 4K gaming won’t arrive from AMD this year, but before Christmas the company does have a new card for entry level PCs.

It’s the 5500 XT and it’ll be sold in two separate forms: 4GB and 8GB models, both of which are designed to challenge the GTX 1650 Super and, depending on price, the GTX 1660. AMD won’t be making any references cards for the 5500 XT – it’ll only be AIB models from MSI, Gigabyte, Sapphire, ASUS, ASRock, XFX and so on, which is generally better since the partners tend to have better designs.

AMD also provided a slide based on some internal testing comparing the performance of the 4GB and 8GB models. The company stressed in a briefing that the 4GB card would generally be sufficient for the kinds of games they expect the 5500 XT to appeal to – basically people who want to play Overwatch, League, Dota 2 at low settings – but there are some games and quality settings where the extra memory buffer can have a sizable impact.

As for the Australian and New Zealand prices, you’ll find them in the table below. Some models of the cards are available in Australia today at certain retailers, while other versions — like the PowerColor 8GB Red Dragon model — won’t be available until next week.

The pricing puts the 5500 XT right in line with the GTX 1650 Super, although some models of the Nvidia card are available for $279 or $289. The 6GB GTX 1660, meanwhile, is available from $349 at the major Australian retailers, although a couple of places are selling clearance stock for a little less.