Why is the High Price of High-end CPUs and GPUs Normal?

Nowadays, hardware fans and especially gamers already see the prices that manufacturers ask us to pay for their high-end products practically normal. Although it has been more than a year and a half since its launch, the RTX 2080 Ti still cost more than 1,200 euros, while Intel‘s Extreme range, for example, also costs around that price. To what extent can we consider the prices of high-end hardware “normal”?

It is true that fortunately we have products of all ranges, and you do not need a graphic of more than 1,000 euros to have a gaming PC capable of moving games at 4K resolution; at the end of the day there is enough catalog to choose the product that best suits our budget . However, it is inevitable to look back, since you could once mount a full high-end gaming PC so today it costs only the top-of-the-range graphics from NVIDIA.

High Price of High-end CPUs and GPUs

Is the high-end price justified?

As they say, “whoever wants something costs something.” A few years ago, someone who was spending 400 euros on a graphics card was sure to be buying the best of the best, a high-end graphics card that would allow him to play all the latest games to the fullest. Today for that money you barely get to buy a mid-range or mid-high range graphic at most (we are talking about an RTX 2060 that costs about 380 euros, because the SUPER version already goes up to 440 euros or more), which is An excellent graphics that allows you to play 1080p with everything to the maximum without problems, but that already falls short in some games, and let’s not talk about 4K resolution anymore.

RTX 2060 SUPER

It is also true that manufacturers (and we do not mention any) increasingly invest in R&D in order to improve the performance and characteristics offered by their products, with better heatsinks, better materials and better manufacturing processes, something that together to inflation it is natural that prices will gradually rise (we cannot hope that a GPU today costs the same as it did 10 years ago, logically).

However, the question we raise here is the following: is it normal for the price of a high-end graphic to rise to more than 1,200 euros?

NVIDIA and Intel have made these prices “normal”

This time we are going to point out the culprits of the situation, and that is that both NVIDIA and Intel have a marketing strategy through which the prices of their high-end products have been rising generation after generation, with the “excuse” that mid-range and upper-middle-range products continue to move in the same price ranges as those of the previous generation.

The problem is that when they bring out the next generation they do the same thing again, and the product that today is high-end, tomorrow is equivalent to the mid-range but with the same price. In other words, every time a new generation of products comes out, be they graphics cards or processors, the top-of-the-range product is becoming a little more expensive. And so, step by step and over the years, we find ourselves in the current situation in which if we want to buy the top-of-the-range product from one of these manufacturers, we have to make a money outlay that few pockets can afford.

Intel 10900K

Many of you will be thinking about AMD now, and it is that the company’s policy has almost always consisted of offering greater gross power -both in processors and graphics- and for less money … the “affordable option”. This has changed, at least in the field of processors, with the arrival of the Zen architecture since, as you know, despite having also raised prices, they are still the cheap option for Intel processors but now they have better performance .

In fact, the hope of many is that AMD will continue to press Intel in such a way that they force those in blue to change their pricing strategy , since it would not be reasonable to launch a processor that is worse than that of the competition and on top of it more expensive, ¿ true? The bad part is that at the moment AMD cannot do the same with NVIDIA in the graphics card market, where for the moment they are still behind, at least in the high-end range.

And this is the biggest problem and where we wanted to go with this: competition . In the end it is the competition that sets the market prices, and since NVIDIA is “roaming at ease” in the high range for now, they can set the prices they want for their products, and whoever buys them and who does not, that complies with the mid-range. If AMD were to launch a higher-end graphics more powerful than NVIDIA options and at a better price, then it would be those in green who would be forced to restructure their pricing strategy, or at least that would be desirable for us users.

In any case, it is undeniable that the fact that a top-of-the-range GPU currently costs 1,200 or more euros and that a high-end processor (not to mention the enthusiastic or Extreme range) costs around 500-600 euros is blame Intel and NVIDIA, since they have spent many years “living on the income” without anyone to put them in difficulties, thus regulating the market at ease.