Expensive $1600 AMD Polaris GPU Spotted Shipping

Remember the $600 and $700 Polaris GPUs we spotted last month in a shipping manifest? It turns out that those chips may not be the top end Polaris chip launching this year. According to the shipping tracker, a ‘Video Graphic Card’ labelled C993 shipped from Canada on February 1st and was valued at 110,603 INR. That’s $1600 or nearly 3x the value of the C981 and C980 that we spotted earlier.

According to AMD, they plan to launch both a Polaris 10 and Polaris 11, with one being a high-end card while the other would service the budget/mainstream market. We had expected the $600-700 C981/980 to be the top end flagship while the $200-$300 C924/913 would be the budget model. With the C993 at $1600, this card completely blows the other cards out of the water and makes it seem like that might be the flagship Polaris card.

At $1600 though, this card would be one of the most expensive cards AMD has released in a long time. At $1600, it would be beyond what Nvidia has charged for the Titan (X, Black), though it would make sense as a dual-GPU utilizing 2 Polaris chips like the C981 and C980. Maybe this is why there are only 2 Polaris chips technically launching but they may have multiple variants and different configurations.