The street prices of Nvidia and AMD GPUs are completely out of control

You may have heard that there is a worldwide shortage of semiconductors, and especially PC graphics cards are almost impossible to find. What you probably have not heard yet is that the situation is gradually getting worse – up to this point some GPUs are worth it triple their MSRP.

Above you can see a picture of two graphics cards, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 and $ 579 AMD Radeon RX 6800 for $ 499. In December, I calculated that the true street price of these cards was $ 819 and $ 841, or $ 1,660, respectively. amounted to. for the couple.

The same photo now contains $ 2,570 of GPUs. It’s not the asking price, please note; people pay on average more than $ 1200 on the open market for each of these graphics cards. And it’s not even as bad as it gets.

This past week, I managed the PS5, Xbox Series X, and each of the new graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD using an open-source eBay scraper to find out how much it’s worth on average over a seven-day period. (big thanks to data analyst Michael Driscoll), then spent a few hours validating the results and erasing forgeries.

TL; DR: although the PS5 and Xbox have cooled down a bit, you even pay double triple for a new AMD or Nvidia GPU.

Honestly, I’m not sure which numbers are the most staggering here. Is it the alleged $ 329 RTX 3060 averaging more than $ 800, or is the RTX 3090 and 3080 each worth $ 900 more than just three months ago? Or is it perhaps that my own 3060 Ti, which I was finally able to get for its retail price of $ 399 after months of trying, could now sell for $ 1,200?

I also looked at how many of these items are sold on eBay, which can give you an idea of ​​how skewed the demand / supply comparison is. For example: over a seven-day period, eBay moved 5,284 PS5 consoles, and yet many of the PS5s listed did not sell. PS5 scalping is becoming less profitable, eBay is flooded and things are slowing down.

But on the PC-GPU side, it’s the opposite. It seems like every GPU sells unless it’s listed well above the average selling price, and there are a few precious few to go around – only 83 of AMD’s RX 6800 and 141 of Nvidia’s RTX 3060 Ti have during the same seven of hands change. -day period as far as I can tell. There is no indication that the scalping will slow down any time soon.

It does not help that the actual retail prices of these graphics cards have also risen northwards. Whether it’s a reaction to the Trump rates or a blatant attempt to get a piece of the action, the GPUs I actually see for sale briefly at Amazon, Best Buy and the Neweggs of the World are very far above the prices that AMD and Nvidia are proposing, such as a $ 840 RTX 3070 or a $ 900 RX 6800. The average list price for a $ 329.99 RTX 3060 was $ 471 on launch day. And although Newegg’s draw originally seemed to be a potentially fair way to pay for retail, it has now almost become a parody:

And yet, if the $ 330 video card you buy for $ 540 is scraped for $ 830, it’s hard to be surprised when MSI and Newegg decide they want to fetch a few hundred dollars for it.

The question is as always when AMD and Nvidia will be able to produce more than a drop of new graphics cards to meet this pent-up demand, and I’m afraid the tea leaves do not look particularly good. AMD’s promise to “make significantly more GPUs available” and regularly refresh inventory on its own website has so far made no significant difference. And while Nvidia warned earlier that it could take until the end of April before things turn around, Digitimes now sources say graphics card makers expect Nvidia’s 30-series GPUs to be in short supply by the third quarter of 2021.