What just happened? Based on community feedback, AMD has released a special Midnight Black edition of the Radeon RX 6800 XT reference design. AMD Red Team members received an email informing them about the new color scheme beforehand, giving them an advance to pick one up. Not surprisingly, they are already sold out.
In an email sent to AMD Red Team community members, the company announced that it would make available the Radeon RX 6800 XT Midnight Black graphics card at 06:00 AM PST on April 7, 2021. The card will be available for a limited time and while supplies last.
"Based on community feedback and popular demand, we have created a select quantity of AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT (Midnight Black) graphics cards featuring the same great performance of the widely popular AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT," said an AMD representative.
As it seems, the only difference between the Radeon RX 6800 XT Midnight Black and the original Radeon RX 6800 XT are in the aesthetics, featuring a black shroud with gray accents around the middle fan.
Similar to the reference Radeon RX 6800 XT, the Midnight Black edition packs the Navi 21 XT GPU with 4608 stream processors and 72 ray accelerators. Moreover, it also features 16GB of GDDR6 memory and 128MB of Infinity Cache.
While stock lasted, the Radeon RX 6800 XT Midnight Black was available for $649.00 on AMD's website.
Considering the ongoing GPU shortage, it was to be expected that grabbing one of these would be very hard unless you got first dibs by being a member of the Red Team community. If you didn't have the chance to buy one from AMD, you can always trust an eBay scalper will sell one for three times the MSRP.