- Pre-orders should go live for AMD’s RX 9070 GPUs on March 23, according to a US retailer
- However, there are a few reasons why this is probably wrong
- We’ve also seen more strangeness surrounding the previously rumored launch of RDNA 4 on January 23, as an ad campaign appears to have failed
As if enough weirdness hasn’t already surrounded AMD’s RDNA 4 GPU launch – indeed, it’s been a strange affair – something at Team Red seems to have gone wrong on the marketing side again, and we’ve also caught mention of a possible new release date for RX 9070 graphics card.
However, I think the date shared by a US dealer is off the mark and just a placeholder, so let’s deal with that first.
The story here is that B&H Photo previously posted what they thought was the date gamers would be able to pre-order RX 9070 models, namely January 23rd – but of course that didn’t happen.
Instead, AMD issued an announcement to let us know that the RX 9070 graphics cards won’t arrive until March (still within the official Q1 2025 timeframe previously promised, it’s worth noting).
VideoCardz then discovered that B&H Photo now has a March 23rd date for pre-orders on RDNA 4 graphics cards – and the retailer still has that date on its site (it hasn’t been removed yet).
The odd thing about this is that March 23rd is a Sunday, so it seems highly unlikely that a sales milestone (pre-orders, or indeed the actual on-sale date) would be on a weekend. AMD would surely wait until Monday (March 24) if this was the plan.
Also, given that the previous date B&H posted was January 23rd, it feels like what might have happened here is that someone working on the product listings just substituted the name of the month in the date and left the same day. (although why an update was even sent to RDNA 4 lists when nothing is official is a good question).
Hence my conclusion that this looks very much like a placeholder date given the way it has happened and the additional fact that it is a Sunday.
The reddit campaign wasn’t cancelled?
The other oddity that backs up some earlier rumors – and the first January date B&H attached to RX 9070 pre-orders – is that some AMD ads have surfaced, following reports claiming you can ‘play now’ with the new RDNA 4 GPUs.
This was again noted by VideoCardz and it happened yesterday, January 23rd, so one theory is that this was a date AMD had actually planned for something big to happen, either a launch or reveal. (If you can ‘play now’ though, then the GPUs would definitely be for sale). Team Red had a bunch of marketing stuff planned for Reddit (as highlighted here) around this, which accidentally still went ahead somehow (with these ads appearing in a few different countries in Europe, and apparently being published on German, Italian and Polish).
The not unreasonable conclusion people are reaching is that AMD had something planned for January 23rd, especially since there were many rumors that this was the case (although some mentioned January 24th, even though it was all in the same ball street in the week that we find ourselves in now). But all of this has now been pushed back to March, although AMD has never officially said anything concrete about the RX 9070 launch other than Q1 2025.
The RDNA 4 rumors have indeed taken some very strange turns, but the good news is that it looks like these next-gen graphics cards will be worth the wait. Although we’ll have to wait until later in March, rather than seeing the RX 9070 GPUs appear earlier this month – and really, I wouldn’t be swayed by the new B&H pre-order date at all for all the reasons mentioned.
