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What was almost unthinkable for almost two years is finally becoming reality: the prices for graphics cards are moving more and more into the RRP regions. A particularly nice sight are our current figures for the eBay sales platform, where many used models change hands.
Nvidia’s Geforce RTX 3070 has changed hands on average from the last 30 successfully sold offers for 539 dollars – in the Nvidia shop the Founders Edition costs ten dollars more. The fall in prices compared to May last year is particularly blatant.
As you can see in the picture below, the average price of the RTX 3080 was almost 2,000 dollars (!). Today, on the other hand, the average selling price is more than half as low at just over 800 dollars. A fundamentally positive development, which, however, has two possible snags.
Problem #1: New GPUs are coming
Many players didn’t see the extremely expensive RTX 3000 and RX 6000 prices. The wait for lower prices has now lasted so long that the release of the new generations RTX 4000 and RX 6000 should only be a few months away – do you really want a model that soon obsolete
Buy previous generation?
In principle, you can also improve the performance of your PC with the current GPUs, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the hardware you have. In addition, you have to reckon with a significantly higher power consumption with the upcoming models from AMD and Nvidia.
On the other hand, it can be assumed that the prices for the RTX 3000 and RX 6000 will continue to fall once their successors have arrived in stores, which would speak against buying them at this point in time. However, everyone should agree on one point: reaching price regions in the RRP range is almost two years too late.
Problem #2: Separating the mining wheat from the chaff
Even Nvidia’s CMP models without video connections, which are specially designed for miners, have not changed the high demand caused by the cryptocurrency boom since the end of 2020.
An undisputedly important factor for the extreme price development has been the increasing since the beginning of 2022 fading boom of cryptocurrencies like Ethereum.
In principle, a graphics card should often be suitable for gaming for a long time without any losses, even after intensive mining operation. However, the risk of encountering a particularly badly treated or impaired model is likely to increase if more and more miners now want to get rid of their cards that are no longer needed.
Well available: RTX cards at Amazon
However, it has to be said that this risk always exists when buying used models and that you can’t handle a GPU badly even when playing games (e.g. in the form of unnecessary heat development). Since the video memory is primarily used during mining, difficulties are most likely to be expected there in this case. You can find out more about this in this article:
Caution with used graphics cards:
Miners are flooding the market right now, but should you buy?
As nice as it is, graphics card prices are finally back in reasonable proportions normal
regions, one can be sobered about the timing of this development and the circumstances surrounding it.
how is your situation Have you now bought a current model due to the falling prices, bought it a long time ago at significantly higher prices or are you skipping the RTX 3000/RX 6000 and waiting for the successors? Let us know in the comments!
