$360 Amazon - ASUS Dual AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Standard Edition 12GB /w free game promo

I scored one of these about two weeks ago on the 19th from another slickdeal thread but the deal went MIA pretty quickly and stayed that way. By scored, I mean I was able to process one from cart before it disappeared and it remained OSS, not that I have actually received it... yet. That projected ship date was way out there, around dec 10th!

However, it looks like stock is finally back but for $10 more but at least you won't have to wait as long, presumably - you'll probably get it around the same time I'll finally see mine, heh.


-Comes with the free game promotion, Dead Island 2 or Callisto Protocol - see added screenshot [ibb.co] on how to redeem the offer.

The Dead Island 2 trailer [youtube.com] is a bit, meh...
Though, this [youtube.com] redeems it slightly.

However, Callisto [youtube.com] looks pretty awesome, ngl!:


Actual product link [amazon.com].

-Ship and sold by Amazon.
-Return policy: No restocking fee malarkey and free shipping return label - Returnable until Jan 31, 2023. How can you go wrong?



Other notes:
When I was researching this at the time of purchase, there doesn't seem to be as many user reviews on this Asus model versus say, the other popular 6700 XT deals that have been popping up SD, but they are generally favorable across Amazon and Newegg... with the negative reviews mainly just complaining of scalper prices, not being able to change the RGB lighting on the card and a couple getting unlucky with coil whine (which seems to be a cross-manufacture issue if you just get unlucky no matter who you choose).

It's also thicc and apparently not a two-slot card, more like three. So beware of that. It uses an 8+6 12volt GPU wiring configuration where the XFX uses 8+8 pin instead for example.

There's also an "OC" version [amazon.com] of this Asus card for $30 more ($390) but from the reviews I've seen & read (such as Hardware Unboxing), the "OC versions" of this generation are never worth the price increase. Basically they're just a tiny, dismal manufacture-made overclock, that you could easily do with AMD's own Adrenaline Software.

Speedwise, it compares to a GTX 3060ti or 3070 depending on the game though only for rasterization (where most of the heavy lifting is anyway). Enabling RTX is an entirely different story and the Nvidia counterparts spank it. Though many people don't consider RTX as a viable option even with the nvidia cards at this level anyway (still too expensive of a framerate hit unless you're in 3080ti/4090 territory but of course, that's super subjective - what framerate you consider acceptable).

Also, Nvidia's DLSS still outperforms AMD's FSR though not as harshly with the progression of FSR 2.0/2.1. And one last note, just from my experience, AMD's Adrenaline display control panel, while pretty cool as I love the in-game overlay, doesn't allow as much color adjustment as Nvidia's control panel does (it does the basics, just not as granular and i like to tweak colors down to the tee).

Though one perhaps not-so-known benefit of AMD over Nvidia, if your CPU is lacking, AMD graphics cards drivers have less overhead and perform better when there's a CPU bottleneck versus Nvidia cards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLEIJhunaW8