There is no doubt that the price bubble caused by mining has already burst and we are now seeing the consequences of it. And it is that the drop in prices that we are seeing of this important component for PC is nothing more than a consequence of it. In any case, this would be no news to us, were it not for the fact that many of the models have suffered a spectacular price drop, especially those that came out at the end of said madness. Is this the best time to buy a graphics card?
The arrival of the future RX 7000 with RDNA 3 architecture by AMD and the RTX 40 with ADA architecture by NVIDIA is a fact. However, the market has been flooded with graphics cards after the GPU mining bubble burst. This has come from two fronts, on the one hand, second hand through mining cards reconfigured for games. On the other hand, that huge stock of cards that have increased in price, gathering dust on the shelves of stores and warehouses and that, due to their excessive cost to the consumer, have not been in high demand.
Graphics cards are put below their official price
Well, the drop in prices has been gradual and is normal in any bubble. Although the most surprising thing is that there are already graphics cards with a price below the recommended retail price. That is to say, much cheaper than they should have been if their price increase had not occurred. This is mainly due to both NVIDIA, AMD and their partners looking to get rid of the stock in their inventory before the launch of the new generation.
And we have very crazy cases of it, examples like the ones you can see in the images above:
- As for the RX 6900 XT , we have the GIGABYTE Gaming OC and ASRock Phantom Gaming priced down from $1,000 to $ 700.
- If we talk about NVIDIA, we find that the RTX 3080 Ti have resumed production and now with a price lower than its PVP, $900.
In other words, the price of high-end graphics cards is currently reduced by over 30% compared to the official price. It is not that the two examples have an accessible cost, but the reality is that they were models with prices above 1,000 euros in terms of their RRP.
The best time to buy a graphics card?
This is a question that many of our readers are asking today, and our recommendation is that if you have a graphics card older than the AMD RX 6000 or the NVIDIA RTX 20, then consider making the jump. More than anything because of the full support for DirectX 12 Ultimate, as well as a considerable performance increase thanks to FSR and DLSS and having access to Ray Tracing in games that support it. Moreover, the era where it was mandatory to change the model almost every year has long since passed into history.
The price of graphics cards has been a controversial topic for years and not only because of mining, but because of how high they were. The current stock is finite and if you need one for your PC and you have enough capital, then do not hesitate to go for the one that best suits your needs. Since when there is the generational change, that extra performance will have a price that very few of us will be able to reach with our pocket. So it’s possibly the best time in years to make a graphics card purchase.
