Street prices for Nvidia and AMD GPUs are totally out of control

You may have heard that there is a global shortage of semiconductors and that video cards in particular are almost impossible to find. What you probably didn’t hear is that the situation is getting worse and worse – to the point where some GPUs are worth it triple your MSRP.

Above, you will see a photo of two video cards, the $ 499 Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 and the $ 579 AMD Radeon RX 6800. In December, I calculated that the true market price of these cards had reached $ 819 and $ 841, respectively, or $ 1,660 for the pair.

That same photo now contains $ 2,570 in GPUs. This is not the asking price, mind you; people are actually paying more than $ 1,200 on the open market, on average, for each of these graphics cards. And this is not as bad as it looks.

Last week, I ran the PS5, Xbox Series X and each of the new graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD using eBay’s open source scraping tool to find out how much they are worth on average over a seven-day period (much thanks to data analyst Michael Driscoll), then spent a few hours validating the results and eliminating forgeries.

TL; DR: although the PS5 and Xboxes have cooled down a bit, you will pay twice as much, up to triple for a new AMD or Nvidia GPU.

Frankly, I’m not sure which numbers are the most surprising here. Does the $ 329 RTX 3060 supposedly cost more than $ 800 on average, or is the RTX 3090 and 3080 each worth $ 900 more than three months ago? Or could my own 3060 Ti, which I finally managed to snap at the retail price of $ 399 after months of trying, sell for $ 1,200 now?

I also noticed how many of these items are actually being sold on eBay, which can give you an idea of ​​how the supply / demand equation is distorted. For example: over a seven-day period, eBay changed 5,284 PS5 consoles, yet many of the listed PS5s did not sell. The scalping of the PS5 is becoming less profitable, eBay is flooded and things are getting slower.

Still, on the PC GPU side, it’s the opposite. Each GPU appears to be selling, unless they are listed well above the average selling price, and there are a few precious ones to circulate – only 83 from AMD RX 6800 and 141 from Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti changed hands during the same seven day period as far as I can tell. There is nothing here to suggest that scalping will decrease anytime soon.

It doesn’t help that the actual retail prices of these graphics cards are also falling north. Whether it’s a reaction to Trump’s tariffs or a blatant attempt to get a share of the action, the GPUs I really see briefly on sale at Amazon, Best Buy and Neweggs in the world are often far, far above the prices that AMD and Nvidia suggest, such as a $ 840 RTX 3070 or a $ 900 RX 6800. The average list price for a $ 329.99 RTX 3060 was $ 471 on launch day. And while Newegg’s giveaway originally looked like a potentially fair way to pay retail, it has now almost become a parody:

Still, when that $ 330 video card you buy for $ 540 can scale to $ 830, it’s hard to be surprised when MSI and Newegg decide they want to extract a few hundred dollars from it for themselves.

The question, as always, is when AMD and Nvidia will be able to produce more than a handful of new video cards to meet this pent-up demand, and I’m afraid the tea leaves don’t look particularly good. AMD’s promise to make “significantly more GPUs available” and regularly update inventory on its own website has not made a significant difference so far. And while Nvidia has previously warned that it may take until the end of April for things to change, Digitimes now says sources from video card makers expect Nvidia’s 30-series GPUs to remain in short supply until the third quarter of 2021.