After a historic high for GPU prices, we finally are beginning to see a drop in the critical computer hardware market. Tom’s Hardware in the US and 3DCenter.org in Germany have been monitoring eBay and local retail prices, and they’ve seen the same thing: nearly every new graphics card from Nvidia and AMD has experienced a large price drop.
Do you want to buy an Nvidia RTX 3080? That would have cost you $1,773 on the street just two months ago, more than twice the manufacturer’s suggested retail price. That was typical of the hottest graphics cards, as we highlighted in November with our own chart, and Tom’s Hardware indicates things got somewhat worse in December. However, in January, those costs fell 11% to little under $1,600 on average.
The RTX 3080 isn’t the only RTX 3000 and AMD Radeon RX 6000 graphics card that has had a price drop of 5 to 10%, with the RX 6900 XT being the only one that has seen a price increase.
However, according to Tom’s Hardware, the pace of sales on eBay has decreased significantly, and certain cards were scarcely selling to begin with: only nine Radeon RX 6800 units changed hands in a week. It’s conceivable that prices are falling as a result of some individuals giving up and refusing to pay scalper fees.
Perhaps it has anything to do with the current plunge in bitcoin prices. It’ll be fascinating to watch if the latest fall pulls GPU prices down further, since miners will no longer value them as highly. When miners are unable to put their graphics cards to use, they frequently sell significant volumes of them. Because this batch of eBay data is from last week, it may not yet reflect the full impact of crypto.
With these two reports, it feels like a promising omen — even if you’ll still have to pay more than double the MSRP for an RTX 3060 Ti at the moment.
While there haven’t been any big signs that supply has caught up to demand (these GPUs are still exceedingly difficult to come by at anything less than ridiculous costs), Nvidia and AMD have both stated that supply would increase in the second half of 2022.
On the console front, secondhand eBay prices for the PS5 and Xbox Series X are also falling. I looked at eBay prices over the last three months and found that both Sony and Microsoft’s flagship systems had fallen $100 in price, from an average of $800 to roughly $700. If you’re interested, here are the graphs.