I mean, if we're using retail prices, you might as well argue the 6700 XT wasn't the same class as the 3070 anyway, since it also retailed over a hundred dollars cheaper on average and its price often matched the 3060 Ti. Nowadays it's even cheaper.

Well the 6700XT should be closer at retail to a 3070 than a 3070 is to a 6800 because of the MSRP. Hence why it's called Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price... AMD would be taking nearly as big of a cut from retailers from a 6700XT vs Nvidia would be from the 3070.

Yeah, the street price difference of each launch was even higher than the $80 MSRP difference suggests.

When I ordered my RTX 3070 at the end of October 2020, the street price of these cards was $/€ 100 above the MSRP.

Three weeks later (at the launch of the RX 6800) the street prices of all new GPU models were already $/€ 150 above the MSRP, another two weeks later (at the launch of the RTX 3060 Ti) the street prices of all new GPU models were already $/€ 200 above the MSRP.

So I would have paid around the same for a 3060 Ti early December 2020 as for my 3070 when I bought it in late October 2020.
And I would have paid around €100 - €150 more for a RX 6800 at its November launch as for my 3070 end bought in late October 2020, not just €80 more.

Usually I wait until "all cards are on the table" for a more informed decision... but due to the unusual situation at the end of 2020 (chip crisis + crypto mining + Covid-19) waiting for that wouldn't have paid off in this peroid of price hikes for all popular GPUs. Unless you were very, very, very lucky and could get one of the GPUs directly from Nvidia or AMD at MSRP price.

Would I buy or recommend a 8 GB GPU (for more than $/€ 400) in 2023? Never!

But since I have a huge backlog of games which have no problems with 8 GB VRAM at all, I can probably fully enjoy my "crippled" 3070 for the next years and skip the current gen hardware and the problematic titles. Maybe I'll switch earlier if I get a good deal this or next summer, but probably not.

I swear most CEO's these days are snorting crack or on meth, because they are all seemingly coming out with such crazy shit, from Sony to Atari to SE, to Ubisoft, Konami, Monster, etc, list just goes on. 

Are there even college/Uni courses on being an executive/CEO?, because if not, I think it's time that one be made, because this should not be happening at all to all these companies, it's straight up crazy and bad behaviour. 

The result would have been much the same with the 6700XT, just maybe not quite as drastic. Also, they could have compared the 6800 with the 3070Ti, which would have been pretty much the same result, since that card also just has 8GB and the price was even higher than the one of the 6800. It's possible they didn't have any at hand thus had to settle for the "normal" 3070 for this test.

The verdict either was is the same: For a card with a MSRP of $500 in 2020; 8GB VRAM was simply not enough. 12GB should have been the minimum back then, but even the original 3080 didn't even have that much.

On a side note, we're going to have a rehash within 1-3 years with the 4070/Ti. It's 2023 NVidia, not 2020 anymore! 16GB should have been onboard, with just 12 it will run into the same issues long before the competition does...

@bolded: They keep their price because NVidia is much better known and because AMD is seemingly never gonna live down the driver issues they had during the GCN era, not because of any intrinsic higher quality - it's all due to image and marketing. 

Please, they teach political science at college but, do we have better polititians now? Nope. Imagine what kind of sociopath we could from such a degree about teaching CEOs. You could bet your ass that customer satisfaction would be the last of the subjects taught in such course.

My wonder is what is Coca Cola doing about it since Monster Energy is one of their many brands. Are they ok with that attitude and the factthat it can damage its business?

But well, I don't drink energy drinks, never had, but if I ever have the need to take one, I know what brand I won't get.

You can use RAID to mirror drives.

Current prices, the 3070 vs 6800 is a valid comparison.

The 6750XT 12GB is a good 20-25% cheaper than the 3070 currently... I would still grab one of those instead.

I think the comparison would have been much more fair and personally I don't care if the 3070 wins or loses but more so about comparing the same class of cards. Comparing different class of cards skews the results in one side a lot more aggressively than it should and gives the wrong idea. I do agree that comparing the 6800 vs 3070 Ti would have showed similar results but again, that's also the point. The 3070 Ti was a terrible card for it's price and there were a few people looking to upgrade to it on this site which I recommended against.

Well Nvidia also has objectively better features like with the DLSS vs FSR comparison and objectively longer driver support like with GTX 900 series vs RX 300 series and objectively better Ray Tracing performance and objectively better workstation performance. So it's really not all due to image and marketing but rather, Radeon cards have features and track record that are objectively worse and continue to be so. Not long ago did we see the GTX 900 series getting faster driver updates than 6900XT with it's 2.5 month driver gap. The only real ding against Nvidia is the vram which granded is a big ding but both of them earned their respective reputation.

I know, but it doesn't help if something causes the data to turn bad happens to the data on one drive. Ransomware is an obvious example, but I wouldn't be surprised if some (possibly rare?) hardware faults could also cause data corruption that simply gets mirrored between the drives. I imagine RAID protects against a sudden loss of a drive, but that's about it. That might be sufficient protection depending on your needs, but I feel like it's important to know the limitations of RAID for backup purposes if you're considering RAID for backups.

Even in non-RAID situations, Ransomware can take down all your drives anyway, I've seen it happen, so RAID or not makes very little difference in that instance.

A NAS however tends to be protected by various networking protocols so it's shielded to a degree.

If there is corruption on a drive, you can usually restore it/repair it.