- Pre-orders set to go live for AMD’s RX 9070 GPUs on March 23, US retailer says
- There are a few reasons why this is probably wrong, though
- We’ve also seen more weirdness surrounding the previously rumored January 23 launch for RDNA 4, as an ad campaign appears to have botched
As if enough weirdness hasn’t already surrounded AMD’s GPU launch – it’s been a strange affair indeed – something at Team Red seems to have botched the marketing again, and we’ve also caught mention of a new possible release date for RX 9070 graphics cards.
However, I think the date shared by a US retailer is discontinued, and just a placeholder, so let’s deal with that first.
The story here is that B&H Photo previously released what it believed to be the date gamers would be able to pre-order RX 9070 models, which was January 23 – but of course, that didn’t happen .
Instead, AMD made an announcement to let us know that the RX 9070 graphics cards won’t arrive until March (still within the official Q1 2025 timeline that was previously promised, it’s worth noting).
Following this, Videocardz spotted that B&H Photo now has a date of March 23 for pre-orders on rDNA 4 graphics cards – and the retailer still has that date on its site (it hasn’t been removed yet) .
What’s strange is that March 23 is a Sunday, so it seems very unlikely that a sales milestone (pre-order, or even the actual on-sale date) will be over a weekend. AMD would surely wait until Monday March 24th if that was the plan.
Also, keeping in mind that the previous date B&H posted was January 23, it feels like what might have happened here is that a staff member working on the product listings just replaced the name of the month on the date and left the same day (But why an update was published on the mDNA 4 lists, when nothing is official, is a good question).
Hence my conclusion that this looks a lot like a placeholder date, given how it happened, and the added fact that it’s a Sunday.
The Reddit campaign has not been canceled?
The second oddity that supports some previous rumors – and the original January B&H date attached to RX 9070 pre-orders – is that some AMD ads have appeared, according to reports, claiming you can ‘play now’ with the new RDNA 4 4 GPUS.
This was noticed by Videocardz again, and it happened yesterday, January 23, so one theory is that this was a date that Amd had indeed planned for something big to happen, either a launch or a revelation. (If you can “play now”, GPUs would surely be on sale). Team Red had a bunch of marketing stuff planned for Reddit (as reported here) around this, which accidentally continued somehow (with these ads appearing in a few different countries in Europe, apparently released in German , Italian and Polish).
The non-insufficient conclusion people are reaching is that AMD had something planned for January 23, especially since there were a lot of rumors it was (although some mentioned January 24, although everything be in the same stage of the week as we find ourselves now). But all of this has now been postponed until March, although officially, as mentioned, AMD has never said anything concrete for the RX 9070 launch other than it being Q1 2025.
The rumors around rDNA 4 have indeed taken some very strange turns, but the good news is that it looks like these next-gen graphics cards are worth waiting for. Although we have to hang on until later in March, rather than seeing the RX 9070 GPUs emerge earlier in the month – and really, I wouldn’t be swayed at all by the new B&H pre-order date for all the reasons mentioned .
