At long last, Nvidia and AMD GPU street prices are beginning to drop

theverge.com:

We’re not out of the woods yet — not even close — but it looks like the prices of Nvidia and AMD GPU prices may finally be coming down. Tom’s Hardware in the US and 3DCenter.org in Germany have been charting eBay and local retail prices, respectively, and they’re each seeing the same thing: a substantial dip for nearly every new graphics card that Nvidia and AMD make.

Want an Nvidia RTX 3080? Just two months ago, that might have cost you $1,773 on the street — over two and a half times the manufacturer suggested retail price. As we reported in November with our own chart, that was typical of the hottest graphics cards, and Tom’s Hardware shows things got slightly worse in December. But in January, those prices have dipped 11 percentto just under $1,600 on average.

The RTX 3080 isn’t alone: most every other RTX 3000 and AMD Radeon RX 6000 graphics card dipped between around 5 and 10 percent, with the RX 6900 XT being the sole exception whose price went up.

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Mind you, Tom’s Hardware also shows the volume of sales went down considerably on eBay, and some cards were barely trading to begin with: just nine units of the Radeon RX 6800 changed hands in a week. It’s possible prices are coming down because some people are giving up, unwilling to pay scalper fees.

Or, perhaps it has to do with the nosedive that cryptocurrency has taken recently. It’ll be interesting to see if the recent slump drives GPU prices down dramatically since they won’t be nearly as valuable to miners now. Miners will often sell large quantities of graphics cards when they can’t put them to work. This batch of eBay data is from last week, so it doesn’t contain the full impact of crypto quite yet.

But 3DCenter.org shows the dip isn’t just