When we talked about Sapphire's new hybrid-cooled 6900 XT on Friday, there was one little piece of information we didn't know: the impressive combination of onboard fans cooling RAM and VRMs and a dedicated liquid cooling loop for the Radeon RX 6900 XTXH We knew about the solution. We also knew that the Toxic Boost would allow the clock to reach an astounding 2,730 MHz. What we didn't know was the cost. Because some things are too much of a burden for humans.

But that has now changed, as Sapphire's publicist got back to me late Friday with the one detail missing from the press release about Sapphire's most radical graphics card to date.

The price is a hefty $2,499. [higher than my main gaming machine. It is more expensive than every PC (or close to it) I have ever owned and is definitely the most expensive graphics card I have ever written about. Looking back, some of these cards make me wonder who or what was thinking when they were designed.

Maybe that's exactly how the Sapphire Toxic AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Extreme Edition will be remembered (aside from having a ridiculously long name). It is a card that was once on the cutting edge, albeit for a very short time.

Then again, if you're in the market for a high-end graphics card now, this price tag is certainly expensive, but far from ridiculous; products like the RTX 3080 still fetch prices like this on eBay. Even a normal rendition of a standard AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT costs over $2,000. We have no intention of suggesting that you buy a used graphics card for this kind of money. But this is our market. And people are clearly buying cards for these kinds of prices. It's astonishing.

More importantly, this is the market that this Extreme Edition is in. Sapphire will no doubt still sell all the cards. No doubt about it, AMD's RDNA 2 GPUs don't seem to favor mining as much as Nvidia's 30 series.

No, this is a card that targets only the most extreme users: graphics card overclockers. Well, not completely anyway. The base 6900 XT sells for $999, and it comes with a standard cooler. This is a different dimension and was always going to cost a fortune. We just didn't expect it to be as expensive as it is.