At the beginning of this month of June, we could already see that the average price of graphics cards in stores fell to 12.6% in US stores compared to the prices they had at the beginning of May; the price of gaming GPUs is still high compared to what it should be, but it is possible that we are finally beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel and that we are not far from returning to a normal situation in which any user you can buy any graphics card at the price dictated by the manufacturer and not at hefty prices due to speculation, both from resellers and from the stores themselves.
The price of gaming GPUs starts to drop
Geizhals.eu, the search engine that tracks hardware prices and availability in Austria, Germany, Poland, and the UK, now lists a total of 19 NVIDIA LHR graphics cards available from dozens of retailers in various countries. Their prices range from € 599 for an RTX 3060 to € 1,899 for an RTX 3080 Ti, and in total there are about 100 models of GeForce RTX 30 series LHR graphics on the list, although most of them are not yet available. .
There are more than a hundred SKUs that are not part of this family of charts with limitations for cryptocurrency mining and that are listed as available, with prices also oscillating in the same ranges that we have described before, which suggests that Having a high-end gaming GPU is today almost a luxury, since with what the GPU only cost a couple of years ago you could buy a complete gaming PC without problems.
Thousands of kilometers from Europe, visitors to large stores located in the famous Akihabara district of Tokyo, Japan, also report that graphics cards have started to reappear on store shelves. Most of the new gaming GPUs arriving are in fact NVIDIA LHR models that present little interest to miners due to their poor mining performance; Prices are still high and even crazy, but at least the GPUs are in stock and it is only a matter of time before the price normalizes.
“We have a lot of graphics cards in stock”, a representative of the Dospara store told ITMedia.co.jp, “The only new models to arrive are from the NVIDIA LHR family. The price continues to rise, but the inventory itself is already at reasonable levels.
Meanwhile, the situation in the United States has not improved much. Online retailers like Amazon or Newegg don’t have much direct stock yet, and in fact Newegg still sells all new GPUs through a raffle system whereby the user simply “wins” the chance to buy. PCPartPicker is another example, and they only have a dozen GPU models available and half of them are older generations, while the other half have crazy prices. Meanwhile, BestBuy only has two GPUs in stock: the GT720 for $ 70 and the GT1030 for $ 130.
Unfortunately, there are no precise ways to monitor the availability and sales figures of graphics cards (beyond the quarterly reports of major analyst firms such as Jon Peddie Research), but according to various indicators we can say that the availability situation is starting to get better. Prices remain high because demand continues to outpace supply, but if stock continues to improve it is only a matter of time before prices return to normal.
