A photo of the RTX 3060 being sold by a supplier in Pakistan for $ 750.
NVIDIA’s next RTX 3060 was an excellent value proposition. With 3584 CUDA cores, its performance was firmly positioned between the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti, and the $ 329 MSRP made it one of the best investment cards on the market. Unfortunately for gamers, GPUs in 2021 remain a dream for most. Some European retailers have already marked the card with more than $ 600 USD (EUR 499), which is almost twice the prize on NVIDIA’s MSRP and 50% on the official European MSRP.
European retailers raise prices for the next RTX 3060 by almost 50% compared to the official EU MSRP
The price increase was detected by the Videocardz user, The Determinator, and posted by WhyCry. While NVIDIA tries to get suppliers to follow their MSRP by allocating cards to suppliers who will fulfill pre-orders in MSRP, retailers have adopted the tactic of canceling these pre-orders and forcing customers to place new orders at inflated prices. You can argue here that NVIDIA cannot really do anything else in this situation while remaining under the rules of a free market. While it may limit or restrict future supply to these suppliers “at will”, they cannot really be seen imposing price conditions on any retailer (which would be against the law).
Some retailers in Europe have even increased the prices of the RTX 3060 to an impressive $ 835 USD (or $ 689 EUR), which is absolutely insane considering it is almost three times the original MSRP at this point. In the comparison images before and after, you can see that the initial (already inflated) prices of the RTX 3060 compared to the new exorbitant prices of PCDIGA – a European store:
We heard that the RTX 3060 will have the largest allocation of the entire NVIDIA 3000 series line so far, but considering the growing cryptocurrency (and mining) market and the insane demand for GPUs, it is difficult to see how the free market does not keep increasing the prices of this incredibly valuable silicon. The sad fact of 2021 is that players are simply not as profitable customers for retailers as miners – and as long as there is demand for these exorbitant rates, retailers will continue to raise their prices.
We’ve seen Pakistani retailers sell the RTX 3060 (which hasn’t even been launched yet!) For $ 750 and it’s hard to see how the situation will improve anytime soon, given the current supply constraints. The only ray of hope for players seems to be in pre-construction, where you can regularly find prizes as low as 10% – which is next to nothing in 2021. Buying a pre-made may be the only way for players to get some GPUs this year, considering large OEMs like HP, Dell and Alienware have the resources (and willpower) to apply reasonable MSRPs.
Physical stores can also make a comeback, since scalping through bots is impossible to scale in the real world and you can actually choose a prefabricated one with decent specifications at the best buy. With the rate at which prices are rising, it may be cheaper to buy only pre-made and sell the components you don’t want instead of buying a GPU directly.