And the news is getting worse for people trying to build a new system. Those who want to buy graphics cards compete between scalpers and miners to get cards. Note that many claim that NVIDIA sells tickets directly to miners. Some may say: I will settle with a laptop, but miners also buy laptops to mine crypto. If you go one step lower and are satisfied with a console, you need to deal with scalpers because consoles are also resold due to the low inventory and the high demand.
Rates, Chinese New Year and raw material supply faulty to cause GPU shortages
Last December I treated the data on the resale market of these products but I decided that the update is needed because the issue has gotten worse. Michael Driscoll went on to collect all the data from these products that resold on eBay in January. Tom’s Hardware worked with him to get updated data on the graphics card market. The new data is, to say the least, disappointing from the perspective of an observer and discouraging from the perspective of a buyer.
Source: Michael Driscoll
Why are we seeing an increase in the pricing of these components? This is not the simplest case here. Most will assume as the pandemic appears to be more under control, production would return to normal, but this simply did not happen. Many factors caused this. The most obvious answer to the shortage is the lack of raw materials. The supply chain has been interrupted, and production will also be interrupted. AMD has said on several occasions that obtaining substrate packaging has become increasingly difficult.
Source: Michael Driscoll
A person who does not have the complete picture will respond if the shortage continues, why do prices continue to rise with about the same demand? The most obvious of these is the rates, but the price increase on the resale list for lower-end cards is greater than the price push on the MSRP of those cards. This is certainly a factor, but it is certainly not the main reason why the price might have occurred.
Source: Michael Driscoll
The location of these factories is in Asia, specifically in Taiwan and China. The reason it is important is the celebration of the Chinese New Year. This holiday concludes the work in these regions about one to two weeks. If no stock comes from the factories, retailers can push the market and let people who need or really want a GPU buy at an even higher price.
Data shows that 15,300 graphics cards were sold on eBay by both NVIDIA and AMD
Let’s look at the data. About 15,300 graphics cards from both AMD and NVIDIA have been sold on eBay since early January. Most cards are from the green team. More than 14,000 NVIDIA cards range from the RTX 3060 Ti to the RTX 3090. About 3,000 RTX 3060 Ti have been sold on eBay. The RTX 3070 sold around 5,400 on eBay is by far the most popular card. The RTX 3080 falls 2nd behind the RTX 3080 with about 3,400 sales. The king of the series is last with about 2300 sales.
AMD suffers the same fate, but fewer cards are sold due to less inventory. The RX 6900 XT had 334 sales. The RX 6800 XT had 448 sales and the RX 6800 is close with 434 sales. If you combine it all, you get 1,216 sales. It does not even come down to the sales of a single NVIDIA card. This only shows the shortfall issues that AMD is facing, because the MSRP of these cards would be a popular option compared to the performance in crypto-mining. AMD is only responsible for about 8 percent of the graphics card resale market.
Besides being sold at an incredible price, people are paying exorbitant amounts for these cards. Let’s look at increasing the resale price from January to February. Let me remind you that the January price we are comparing to the February price is not the MSRP. This is the average resale price on cards that are already well above the MSRP. The average January resale price of the RTX 3060 Ti was $ 690, the RTX 3070 was $ 804, the RTX 3080 was $ 1,290, the RTX 3090 was $ 2,087, the RX 6800 was $ 865, the RX 6800 XT was $ 1,179, and the RX 6900 XT was $ 1,458.
The card that took the biggest jump in February is RTX 3060 Ti with a 33% increase in resale price ($ 920). This was followed closely by the RTX 3080 with a jump of 24% ($ 1,593). This was followed by the RX 6800 with a jump of 18% ($ 1,018). Shortly behind it is the RTX 3070 with a jump of 17% ($ 940). Then comes the RX 6800 XT with a jump of 11% ($ 1,312). The one that was least affected was the RX 6900 XT with a jump of 8% ($ 1,570). The RTX 3090 may not have had the biggest jump at 14%, but the average resale price is $ 2,379. It might as well be renamed the Titan RTX for this generation.
All of this can make you feel like a console is a solution, but it’s not. Consoles are also scratched. The data we used comes only from eBay, but other sites like StockX have also started adding these cards to the market. The time to buy hardware is not yet now and the shortages are getting worse. For all consumers who want this hardware, it is the best effort to get stock.