A photo of RTX 3060s sold by a seller in Pakistan for $ 750 dollars.
NVIDIA’s upcoming RTX 3060 was an excellent value proposition. With 3584 CUDA cores, its performance was firmly positioned between the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti, and the $ 329 MSRP made it one of the best money cards. Unfortunately for gamers, GPUs will remain a pipeline for most in 2021. Some European retailers have already spotted the card at $ 600 USD (EUR 499), which is almost twice the premium above NVIDIA’s MSRP and 50% above the official European MSRP.
European retailers raise the prices of the upcoming RTX 3060 by almost 50% above the official EU MSRP
The price increase was seen by Videocardz user The Determinator and posted by WhyCry. While NVIDIA is trying to keep suppliers on its MSRP by allocating cards to suppliers who will pre-order from MSRP, retailers have adopted the tactic of canceling said pre-orders and forcing customers to reorder at high prices. You could argue here that NVIDIA can not really do anything else in this situation while staying under the rules of a free market. While this may limit or restrict the future offer to these sellers “at will”, it cannot really be seen that the price conditions of any trader are enforced (which is against the law).
Some retailers in Europe have even increased the prices of the RTX 3060 to a whopping $ 835 USD (or $ 689 EUR), which is absolutely insane as it is almost three times the original MSRP at this point. In the screenshots before and after comparison you can see that the initial (already inflated) prices of the RTX 3060 compared to the new exorbitant prices on PCDIGA – a European store:
We have heard that the RTX 3060 has so far allocated the most out of all 3000 series from NVIDIA, but given the growing market for cryptocurrency (and mining) and the insane demand for GPUs, it’s hard to see how the free market will not be continue to increase the prices of this incredibly valuable silicone. The sad fact of 2021 is that gamers are just as profitable a customer for retailers as miners are – and as long as there is a demand for these exorbitant rates, retailers will continue to notice.
We have already seen Pakistani retailers sell the RTX 3060 (which has not even been launched yet!) For $ 750 dollars, and it is hard to see how the situation will improve any time soon, given the current limited supply. The one ray of hope for gamers is apparently pre-built, where you can regularly find premiums as low as 10% – which in 2021 is almost nothing. Buying a pre-build is perhaps the only way gamers will get their hands on GPUs this year. major OEMs like HP, Dell and Alienware have the means (and willpower) to enforce reasonable MSRPs.
Brick and mortar stores can also make a detour, because in the real world, bumping is impossible on a large scale, and you can pick up a decent pre-built specification. At the rate of rising prices, it may be cheaper to just pre-purchase buildings and sell the components you do not want instead of buying a GPU directly.