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AMD Partner Leaks Navi Details: Beats Nvidia RTX 2070 At $499, Official Reveal At Computex

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Sapphire, one of AMD's biggest board partners, has let several crucial details about Team Red's forthcoming Navi graphics cards ahead of the expected reveal at Computex next week. The highlights: AMD's $500 Navi XT, designed to take down Nvidia's RTX 2070.

Tech Powerup spotted the information via the AMD subreddit. The original Chinese article, based on an interview with Sapphire representatives, has since been deleted.

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While I normally encourage folks to take these types of leaks with a grain of salt, we're only 5 days away from AMD CEO Lisa Su's Computex keynote, and this is exactly the time when companies start leaking info like it's going out of style.

Here's a summary of the leaked Navi details:

  • Navi "XT" will supposedly surpass the performance of Nvidia's RTX 2070 and retail at $499.
  • Navi "Pro" will boast performance that sits somewhere between the RTX 2060 and RTX 2070 for a retail price of $399.
  • Neither Navi GPU will feature hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
  • Radeon VII is intended to remain AMD's flagship GPU, meaning the product with the highest performance. Sapphire notes that AMD will not "scale up" Navi for the enthusiast GPU space.
  • Sapphire is planning custom water-cooled variants for Navi.
  • The alleged release date for Navi is July 7, 2019.
  • Sapphire confirmed that an official reveal for consumer Navi will take place during AMD's Computex keynote on Monday, May 27.

One other major tech event -- E3 -- sits between Computex and the rumored Navi release date of July 7. I suspect that AMD will show the world Navi's key specs and likely a reference design, with actual performance benchmarks reserved for E3 (since the Navi drivers will be further along in development).

If this all shakes out to be true, it looks like AMD still doesn't a high-end GPU to take on the likes of Nvidia's RTX 2080 Ti. And honestly, it doesn't need it. AMD's focus with Navi is certainly improved power efficiency (it typically lags behind Nvidia in this regard) and regaining the coveted price/performance crown.

Expect all of this to be confirmed in a few short days when AMD takes the stage at Computex 2019.

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