The cryptocurrency fad has been driving us insane for the past few years as we saw unprecedented demand for GPUs cause prices to jump far above MSRP and possibly contribute to the launch prices of the current generation of GPUs. Now that the miners have moved on to other things, or to ASICs designed specifically for mining, NVIDIA and AMD saw a large drop in sales volume.
DigiTimes have heard from card vendors that they have an immense amount of inventory stuck in warehouses now that demand has dried up. According to their sources, the price cuts we've seen on the GTX 1060 and 1070 as well as the RX580 may start to spread to other cards in an attempt to clear space for new inventory. You shouldn't expect huge drops over a short time, but you should definitely keep your eye out for bargains over the coming months.
"With the dissipation of the cryptocurrency mining fad, graphics card players have begun cutting product prices in a bid to clear out excess inventory at the expense of profitability, according to industry sources."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- New Contest: Flexible PCBs @ Hackaday
- Corning is working on flexible glass for foldable phones @ The Inquirer
- The first ZX Spectrum prototype laid bare… (What? It was acceptable in the '80s) @ The Register
- Privacy International finds major Android apps are still sharing data with Facebook @ The Inquirer
- Linux 5.0 is out except it's really 4.21 because Linus 'ran out of fingers and toes' to count on @ The Register
- iFixit opens up the Galaxy S10, revealing tiny in-display fingerprint sensor @ Ars Technica
- That's a nice ski speaker you've got there. Shame if it got pwned @ The Register
- Apple no longer refuses to fix iPhones with third-party batteries @ Ars Technica
If what the article is saying
If what the article is saying is true, I’m not surprised there’s a ton of inventory. I doubt the article, however.
For the 1070, on average, they’ve been hovering within $20 of the original MSRP ($379) for months. As of right now, NewEgg has only a handful of models in stock, and third party marketplace sellers are selling them for much higher than MSRP. The lowest priced 1070 on Amazon (from what I could tell given Amazon’s intentionally atrocious search functions) is $359 (Gigabyte), and I believe $329 on NewEgg for the same model.
We’ll see if there is any price cutting to move inventory. I’m not convinced. I think GTX cards like the 1070 sell very well, and are still a cash cow for nVidia and its partners. I single out the 1070 in particular because it’s the only nVidia card sub 400 dollars that has 8GBs of VRAM (albeit GDDR5), and it beats an RX580 in premium 1080p performance. The 580 may be a better “value” proposition, but not a pure performance competitor, and the 590 does not have the same value proposition at $259 (though I do own a 590, and it performs pretty well).
I just recently got a new
I just recently got a new Sapphire Vega 56 Pulse for $260 out the door. I also got lucky and it has Samsung HBM on it! That is a insane price drop from the asking price they had not that long ago.