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We don’t want to get your hopes up or anything, but it seems like GPU prices are finally — finally — starting to fall back to earth. There have been a number of reports over the last few weeks confirming this phenomenon. Now that it’s March, the trend has been continuing, indicating it’s actually happening as opposed to being an anomaly. The slow-but-steady drop in pricing seems to be a reflection of the volatility in the cryptocurrency market. It’s quite simple really; as mining becomes less profitable, GPU prices begin to fall. Less demand, more supply, in other words. It’s gotten so bad (which is good), there’s even GPUs available to purchase, right now, close to MSRP. High-end ones too, not just the RX 6500 XT.
First, there are some caveats to this pricing information. The global GPU market is vast and e-tailers have their own systems and incentive programs. Therefore, prices might be falling on certain platforms but remaining high on others. The latest pricing information, which was gathered by Tom’s Hardware, is for eBay. There’s still scalping and selling happening on Amazon and Newegg, but that’s mostly by businesses. According to their research, prices for all GPUs from the past two generations have dropped approximately 8.8 percent in the past month. The biggest drop was on the Radeon RX 6700 XT, which fell 12.2 percent, to $687. We should point out this GPU’s MSRP is $479, so there’s still a lot of room for improvement. Tom’s points out that the overall drop in February was 11 percent, so the trend is continuing, but might be slowing a bit.
As you can see above, there’s even GPUs available to buy on Amazon right now. This isn’t shipped or sold by Amazon itself (let’s not get carried away here) but this is progress. Also note the highlighted price drop. If you think $1,320 is an outrageous price for an RTX 3080 12GB, somehow, it isn’t. EVGA is selling the same GPU, right now, for $1,299. And it’s actually in-stock, if you can believe it. The company also has an RTX 3080 Ti in stock for $1,429. When was the last time you saw 15 RTX 3080 GPUs in stock at any price?
There’s clearly some room for improvement in these prices, but the trend is encouraging. Tom’s notes that despite the drops, prices are still above MSRP everywhere. Overall, AMD 6000-series GPUs are still 41 percent higher than MSRP. Nvidia prices are even more inflated at 68 percent. That’s not a surprise really, but what’s interesting is previous generation cards are also in high demand. While Nvidia’s 20-series GPUs are only nine percent above MSRP, its GTX 16-series are 47 percent inflated. It’s the same with AMD, as its 5000-series are 49 percent more costly.
It’s possible that another influencing factor here is the rumors of how beastly next-gen GPUs will be. Nvidia’s upcoming flagship GPU is rumored to consume 600W, with a massive L3 cache to boot. Miners will definitely be interested in that one, and if not, scalpers will pick up the slack. Though there hasn’t been many rumors about AMD’s RDNA 3 GPUs, they will likely match Nvidia’s specs. After all, rumors indicate the only reason Nvidia is going hardcore with its next-gen is to match AMD’s efforts. Both GPU families will be produced on TSMC’s 5nm node, so it’ll be the first head-to-head battle we’ve seen in quite some time. If these prices continue to drop, you might even be able to get a last-gen GPU at MSRP by the time the next batch arrives in late 2022.
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