According to rumors, NVIDIA, against the backdrop of the current market situation, may reduce the recommended cost of four video cards from the RTX 3000 line by $100-500, depending on the model, according to the Chinese portal benchlife.info.
The biggest price reduction is expected for the flagship RTX 3090 Ti, which now has a recommended price of $2,000. The RTX 3090, RTX 3080 Ti, and RTX 3080 are also expected to drop in MSRP.
Reducing the recommended prices is a forced step.
First, NVIDIA set prices for the RTX 3000 series during a severe crisis in video cards, when it was simply impossible to buy graphics accelerators due to their absence from suppliers. Secondly, for several weeks now, the real cost of new video cards in the US market has been lower than the recommended one by 3-6%, and in China - up to 38%, plus the secondary market is oversaturated with supply due to the withdrawal of ether miners from mining. All this creates an unpleasant distortion in the market, which NVIDIA is trying to, if not eliminate, then slightly offset by official price cuts.
In addition, it is obvious that the original recommended prices for 3000 series video cards were seriously overstated. Suffice it to recall only a “miner” video card without HDMI ports based on the GTX 1660 NVIDIA CMP 30HX, which the company sold during the shortage at a price of $700, while the pre-crisis cost of a ready-made accelerator of this type was ~$220.
The new graphics card for Nvidia CMP 30HX miners is a complete copy of the GTX 1660 Super/Ti, and it went on sale at a speculative price. The real price of this card at the time of release in 2019 is $220 for the base and $270-290 for the Ti/Super models, respectively.
The cost of video cards
The cost of video cards is influenced by several factors at once. This is the rate of cryptocurrencies, the fall of which has seriously saturated the secondary and remanufactured adapters market, and the general global uncertainty and tension. In the case of the main audience of top-end hardware - we are talking about gamers and enthusiasts - 2022/2023 will be a time of platform change for both Intel with their new 13th generation processors, and for AMD, which will finally stop supporting socket AM4 and introduce new Ryzen 7000 processors with DDR5 support. Obviously, with such upcoming releases, the activity of the gaming part of the audience, which consumes the flagship models, has noticeably decreased in anticipation of new platforms and equipment. Those who missed several generations due to the 2020-2022 graphics card crisis can now wait for the 4000-series RTX to upgrade with all the money that was accumulated during this period.
It is noteworthy that the cost of "popular" models, such as the RTX 3050, 3060 and 3070, remained unchanged, because the demand for them is less dependent on upcoming releases and the mining situation.
Michael Zippo
2022/07/15
https://linkedin.com/in/michael-zippo-9136441b1
[email protected]
Sources: Python.Engineering, benchlife.info
