News that MSI has been slowing down production on AMD’s latest generation of GPUs – the RX 7000 series – could have been slowly burning in the background for some time, but we’re only just realizing it. Stock seems to be drying up, and the fact they completely skipped by a couple of models could be a sign of their future as an AMD GPU board partner.
MSI Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs may have been discontinued
This revelation actually comes from Hardware Unboxed on X. With some further research, we can see on AMD’s official list of GPU partners does indeed list MSI, but they only have two models available – the entry-level RX 7600 and its overclocked variant. Consider MSI’s US store also only features the RX 7600, it looks like they have placed their focus elsewhere. Only time will tell though, especially with the upcoming launch of the RX 8000 series.
Having a browse around online retailers tells us that MSI Radeon cards from the current generation are much harder to source: all we found was this MSI Gaming Radeon RX 7900 XTX on Newegg. That backs up claims they have been discontinued, with stock becoming scarce.
Could MSI be dropped as an AMD board partner?
So, it looks like AMD could slowly be cutting ties with MSI. Looking back at the launch of the 7000 series, MSI was notably one of the launch partners to offer a limited selection, and they never got around to releasing RX 7700 XT or RX 7800 XT cards which arrived later in the generation.
Further speculation could link this potential break-up to the recent release of the MSI Claw, which uses Intel-based hardware (including graphics) rather than the Ryzen Z1 processors we’ve seen a number of other handheld gaming PCs feature. The performance of the Claw hasn’t been great either, but MSI could also stick with them for upcoming Intel Arc Battlemage GPUs.
