And the news continues to get worse for people trying to build a new system. Those looking to buy graphics cards are competing between scalpers and miners to get cards. Mind you, many allege that NVIDIA is directly selling cards to miners. Some may say, I’ll settle for a gaming laptop, but miners are also buying gaming laptops to mine crypto. If you go one step lower and settle for a console, you’ll have to deal with scalpers because consoles are also being resold due to the low stock and high demand.
Tariffs, Chinese New Year, & Raw Material Supply All At Fault For Causing GPU Shortages
Last December, I covered data regarding the resale market of these products, but I decided an update was necessary due to the issue worsening. Michael Driscoll went ahead and collected all the data of these products being resold on eBay in January. Tom’s Hardware worked with him to get updated data on the graphics card market. The new data to say the least is disappointing from the perspective of an observer and disheartening from the perspective of a buyer.
Source: Michael Driscoll
Why are we seeing a spike in the pricing of these components? It’s not the most simple case here. Most would assume since the pandemic seems to be more under control, the production would return to a normal state, but that simply hasn’t happened. Many factors have caused this. The most obvious answer to the shortage is the lack of raw materials. The supply chain has been disrupted so production is also going to be disrupted. AMD has said on multiple occasions said that getting substrate packaging has gotten increasingly difficult.
Source: Michael Driscoll
A person who doesn’t have the full picture would respond with if the shortage is still continuing why are the prices continuing to increase with roughly the same demand? The most obvious of those would be the tariffs, but the price jump on the resale listings for lower-end cards is greater than the price jump on the MSRP of those cards. Certainly a factor, but it’s definitely not the main reason why the price might have occurred.
Source: Michael Driscoll
The location of these factories is in Asia, specifically in Taiwan and China. The reason this is important is because of the celebration of the Chinese New Year. This holiday pretty much shuts down work in these regions for one to two weeks. If no stock is coming from the factories, resellers can squeeze the market and get people who need or really want a GPU to buy at an even higher price.
Data Shows That 15,300 Graphics Cards Have Been Sold On eBay From Both NVIDIA And AMD
Let’s look at the data. Roughly 15,300 graphics cards from both AMD and NVIDIA have been sold on eBay since the start of January. The majority of the cards are from the green team. Over 14,000 NVIDIA cards ranging from the RTX 3060 Ti to the RTX 3090. Around 3,000 RTX 3060 Ti have been sold on eBay. The RTX 3070 had around 5,400 sold on eBay is by far the most popular card. The RTX 3080 falls 2nd behind the RTX 3080 with around 3,400 sales. The king of the lineup falls in last with roughly 2,300 sales.
AMD suffers the same fate, but fewer cards are sold due to less stock. The RX 6900 XT had 334 sales. The RX 6800 XT had 448 sales and the RX 6800 is close behind with 434 sales. Combine all of these and you get a total of 1,216 sales. That doesn’t even amount to the sales of a single NVIDIA card. That just goes to show the shortage issues AMD is facing because the MSRP of these cards vs the performance in crypto mining would make a popular option. AMD only accounts for roughly 8 percent of the graphics card resale market.
On top of being sold at an incredible rate, people are paying exorbitant amounts for these cards. Let’s look at the increase of the resale price from January to February. Let me remind you that the January price we are comparing to the February price is not the MSRP. It is the average resale price on cards already well above their MSRP. The average January resale price of the RTX 3060 Ti was $690, the RTX 3070 was $804, the RTX 3080 was $1,290, the RTX 3090 was $2,087, the RX 6800 was $865, the RX 6800 XT was $1,179, and the RX 6900 XT was $1,458.
The card that took the biggest leap in February is RTX 3060 Ti the with a 33% jump in resale price ($920). It was closely followed by the RTX 3080 with a 24% jump ($1,593). This was followed by the RX 6800 with an 18% jump ($1,018). Closely behind it is the RTX 3070 with a 17% jump ($940). Then comes the RX 6800 XT with a 11% jump ($1,312). The one least impacted was the RX 6900 XT with an 8% jump ($1,570). The RTX 3090 may not have had the most significant jump at 14%, but the average resale price is $2,379. It might as well be renamed to the Titan RTX for this generation.
All this may make you feel like a console is a solution, but that is not the case. Consoles are also being scalped. The data we used was only from eBay, but other websites like StockX have also started to add these cards to the marketplace. The time to buy hardware is not now and the shortages look to be getting worse. For all consumers who want this hardware, your best bet is trying to catch restocks.
