fSince that famous “shortage of components”, the prices of many hardware products have increased significantly, and this is even more true when we talk about graphics cards; the problem is, even now, graphics cards released 2-3 years ago are still not cheap, and in fact are still selling above their MSRP to such an extent that it seems like stores they will prefer to discontinue them before selling more cheap. What is happening?
When NVIDIA launched the RTX 30 Series more than two years ago, getting a graphics card was a utopia due to the scarcity (especially due to cryptocurrency mining), and its price doubled and even more. The problem is that a long time has passed since then, there is a new generation on the market, and the price of these graphics cards has not gone down, even with the usual excuse of “empty inventory”.
Not even old graphics cards are sold cheap
This comes according to a post by 3DCenter, who have 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 MSRP. suggested by the manufacturer). The RTX 3070 was announced for 499 Euros, and now it seems that (in Germany) they can be found cheaper.
3DCenter.org
@3DCenter_org
Graphics Card Market Overview for 🇩🇪🇦🇹 on May 2, 2023
👉 GPU prices in Euros have consistently dropped by ~10% since the end of January, in single cases up to 20%.
👉 GeForce RTX 3070 finally below MSRP: currently from €450 (MSRP at launch was €499).
https://t.co/nSCXvfxCbR
May 02, 2023 • 18:40
We must bear in mind that we are talking about a model of graphics card that, although it is still excellent in terms of performance for playing current games, is now over two and a half years old, and its technology and performance have been widely surpassed by the new ones. generations (both from NVIDIA itself and from AMD). In this respect, the RTX 3070 would sit somewhere between the Radeon RX 6750 XT and the RX 6800 (without XT), both of which have more memory than the RTX 3070.
In Spain things seem not to have changed much, and although the RTX 3070 and others continue to be sold in stores, for now we have not seen their price drop below MSRP. Without going any further and following the example of the RTX 3070, the cheapest model we have found is this one from Zotac, which can be purchased for around €510.
Actually, we could say that paying an “extra” of €10 compared to the price suggested by the manufacturer to have a custom model and also with a factory overclock is quite good, but we still cannot consider this as “cheap graphics cards”, because Let’s remember that they are not models that have just been released on the market, and the natural thing would have been that, when the new generations came out, the previous ones would 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 collecting dust, and because they bought them expensive, they refuse to reduce their price by losing money and would rather even discontinue them than sell them for real cheap . Let’s remember that these graphics, in the second-hand market, are priced at approximately half of what stores ask for them today.
The price is going down little by little
What is certain is that this trend of selling graphics cards at sky-high prices seems to be, at least, calming down little by little, and the prices at which we can find these much-needed hardware products have been relaxing. gradually in recent months; This is what they show in the tweet that we have linked above, where they say that 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. Nor is it normal that, almost 3 years after its launch, previous generation products continue to be sold at prices that, in fact, are still above that recommended by the manufacturer.
Of course, “something is up” and we all assume it is, so unfortunately we can only hope that from now on things will normalize and that, with a bit of luck, AMD and NVIDIA will remember the users who do not they can spend such a lot of money on a graphics card and actually start to release cheaper models on the market.
