fSince this famous “component shortage”, the prices of many hardware products have increased considerably, and this is even more true when we talk about graphics cards; the problem is, even now, graphics cards released 2-3 years ago still aren’t cheap, and in fact still sell above their MSRP so much that it seems stores they would rather stop them before selling more cockroaches. What is happening?
When NVIDIA launched the RTX 30 series over two years ago, getting a graphics card was a pipe dream due to scarcity (particularly due to cryptocurrency mining), and its price doubled and more. The problem is that a long time has passed, there is a new generation on the market, and the price of these graphics cards has not come down, even with the usual “empty stock” excuse.
Even old graphics cards aren’t sold cheap
This comes from a post by 3DCenter, which noticed that in Germany, for the first time since its launch two and a half years ago, NVIDIA’s RTX 3070s are selling below their manufacturer’s suggested MSRP) . The RTX 3070 was advertised for 499 dollars, and now it seems that (in Germany) they can be found cheaper.
3DCenter.org
@3DCenter_org
Graphics Cards Market Snapshot for 🇩🇪🇦🇹 on May 2, 2023
👉 Euro GPU prices have consistently fallen by around 10% since the end of January, in isolated cases by as much as 20%.
👉 GeForce RTX 3070 finally under MSRP: currently from $450 (MSRP at launch was $499).
https://t.co/nSCXvfxCbR
02 May 2023 • 6:40 PM
You have to keep in mind that this is a graphics card model that, although still excellent in terms of performance for playing current games, is now over two and a half years old, and its technology and its performance have been largely overtaken by newer generations (both from NVIDIA itself and from AMD). In this regard, the RTX 3070 would fall somewhere between the Radeon RX 6750 XT and the RX 6800 (without XT), both of which have more memory than the RTX 3070.
In Europe things don’t seem to have changed much, and while the RTX 3070 and others continue to hit stores, so far we haven’t seen their price drop below MSRP. Without going any further and like the RTX 3070, the cheapest model we found is that of Zotac, which can be purchased around 510 $.
In fact, we could say that paying an “extra” of 10$ compared to the price offered by the manufacturer to have a custom-made model and also with a factory overclock is quite good, but we cannot yet consider this as “cheap graphics cards”, because let’s remember that these are not models that have just come out on the market, and the natural thing would have been that when the new generations come out, the previous ones will drop in price.
All this makes us think: it is quite possible that all these graphics cards have been sitting on store shelves for months gathering dust, and because they bought them expensive, they refuse to reduce their price by losing power. money and even prefer to arrest them rather than sell them for really cheap. Recall that these graphics, on the second-hand market, cost about half of what stores ask for today.
The price is gradually falling
What is certain is that this tendency to sell graphics cards at exorbitant prices seems, at least, to be calming down little by little, and the prices at which one can find these indispensable hardware products have gradually relaxed lately. month; This is what they show in the tweet we linked above, where they say the average price of GPUs has been reduced by around 10% since January.
Unfortunately, the price of the graphics is what it is, but what is not normal is that when a new generation comes out that theoretically replaces the previous one, their prices are not reduced. It is also not normal that, almost 3 years after its launch, the products of the previous generation continue to be sold at prices which, in fact, are still higher than those recommended by the manufacturer.
Of course “something is going on” and we all assume that is the case, so unfortunately we can only hope that from now on things will normalize and hopefully AMD and NVIDIA will remember users who can’t spend so much money on a graphics card and start pushing out cheaper models on the market.
