The phenomenon of cryptocurrency mining has turned once-vulgar consumer products into means of production from which to capitalize. This has given graphics cards a new value that has inflated their price above what is acceptable to the average user and has drained stocks. How has the price of GPUs evolved in October 2021? Let’s see.
Contrary to what the indicators said a few weeks ago, the market for graphics cards for PC gaming remains in the following monotony: they continue to sell above their recommended retail price and in small quantities. In other words, we expected a controlled decline in the price of GPUs as the bubble deflated, but this is occurring more slowly and this means that the return to normality in the market is slowing more than the normal.
However, any statement without data does not make sense.
This is the price of GPUs in October 2021
The medium Tom’s Hardware has made a collection on the evolution of the prices of graphics cards for gaming on the second-hand sales platform eBay, specifically in its US version, which we have synthesized in the graph above where we have also compared said information with the recommended sale price given by the different manufacturers. As a clarification, the Radeon RX 6600 It does not have a price corresponding to September due to the fact that it was launched this same month of October, so there was no previous data on sales of this model, which has risen rapidly in price and has been placed above the 500 dollars.
As a curiosity we have the price of the graphics cards of the previous generation, which are just as valid for mining and have also been affected by the bubble, but to a lesser extent due to their lower computing capacity. From them we have the data for September 2021, but not for the first two weeks of October. As with the current generation, we have compared them with MSRP at source and the data could not be clearer: their price has also been inflated. To this we must add that they are old models and it would be normal that they were being sold in stores below their starting price.
The cryptocurrency crash has not yet arrived
Normality means only one thing: the much talked about cryptocurrency crash that is going to drag down the price of graphics cards has not happened yet. However, the level of benefits obtained when mining with graphics cards has been falling progressively, but not enough so that the price of current generation graphics cards composed of the NVIDIA RTX 30 the AMD RX 6000 have gone down enough.
The worst of all is that this could occur in the next generation of graphics cards if the performance when mining with respect to its energy consumption is much higher than in the current one. The biggest challenge when designing new GPU architectures is energy efficiency, which also benefits mining, so we can spend a long time with this problem and if the bubble does not burst in time, drag the NVIDIA RTX 30 SUPER as well as the next generation of graphics cards.
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