ASRock’s new AMD Phantom Gaming graphics cards won’t be launching to a store near you

In not all too surprising news, ASRock have announced their entry into the graphics card market across a handful of countries. Exclusively shipping AMD Radeon RX 500-series graphics cards, ASRock are seemingly looking to capitalise on the current GPU market boom.

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Following a teaser trailer two weeks ago on ASRock Japan – which promised something #fast, #mysterious, and #unavailable. Wait, sorry, #unpredictable – the RX 580 8GB and 4GB, RX 570 8GB, RX560 4GB and 2GB, and RX 550 4GB and 2GB have now been announced under the ‘Phantom Gaming’ branding.

ASRock’s Phantom Gaming cards are heavily reminiscent of chinese-manufacturer Colorful’s cards – which feature an almost identical dual-fan design and shroud (spotted by Guru3D). It was likely from the get-go that ASRock would be, effectively, ‘renting out’ production from another, which now seems very likely to be Colorful.

Production is unlikely to increase with ASRock entering the fray in this way. Instead, what little stock of AMD GPUs there is available will be redistributed under different branding.

Not only will stock deficiencies of AMD’s mining proficient cards prevent many Phantom cards reaching retail for the time being, ASRock also don’t intend on selling their graphics cards in some of the largest markets worldwide. DigiTimes have confirmed that ASRock have no plans to sell in Taiwan, China, or Hong Kong (markets dominated by Colorful), but they’ve also informed PCGamesN that they have no intention of distributing across Europe, either.

According to DigiTimes, ASRock are targeting Latin America, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, Japan (where the teaser originated), and South Korea with their upcoming graphics card range. While we have no confirmation as of yet, it seems unlikely that North America will be included in the initial launch – which we expect will occur within the next six months.