Roger’s $0.02 - Its a GPU Buyer’s Market

If you’re a regular reader of my column you’ll know that I recently purchased a Zotac RTX 3060 Ti to replace my aging PNY GTX 1060. Although my purchase decision was mostly motivated by the need the push to actually pressing order on the Amazon page was the fact that I was getting the card for $375, some $25 cheaper than its price elsewhere including on Amazon the day before. Well, it seems I might have been a little too eager. Recent price drops for RTX 3000 series cards and lower-than-MSRP prices for the just released RTX 4060 Ti suggests we’re in a buyer’s market. In other words, if you’ve been in the market for a new GPU now is probably a good time to buy.

Years of GPU scarcity caused by crypto mining and supply chain shortages drove prices for new performance video cards to eye-watering highs early last year. Even if you wanted a mid-range card like a RTX 3060 or RX 6600XT you could expect to pay anywhere from 10% to 15% more than MSRP. Early this year it seemed prices were finally dropping to a more reasonable 3% to 5% over MSRP. Not great but better. But as the launch date for mid-priced cards from Nvidia’s RTX 4060 Ti and AMD’s RX 7600 approached pricing for the previous generation cards started showing signs of decline. Although a majority of manufacturers like ASUS, Gigabyte, and Sapphire kept their prices close to what they were listing for at the start of the year a few company’s like Zotac and PowerColor made modest price cuts. Of course, this wasn’t too surprising as both manufacturers were widely seen as budget card makers. When the RTX 4060 Ti and RX 7600 press embargo lifted the reviews weren’t very effusive. While the cards did perform better than the models they were replacing the percentage difference between them was in the single digits. And the day before its official release of the RX 7600 AMD announced a last-minute price drop. This was on top of retailers were already marking down many RX 6000 series cards to clear their channels of old stock. This led to some instances of older-gen cards with comparable performance being cheaper than the new offerings.

Even now the Zotac RTX 3060 Ti I thought I got a great deal on is selling for $40 less than what I paid on Amazon and NewEgg.com. After a two-year stretch of GPUs selling for insane prices, it's great to see the opposite occur as retailers and card makers worry that the ho-hum performance of these latest cards is pushing people to not upgrade their GPUs. But if you were waiting for prices to drop to upgrade your older setup to something more recent this might be the time to buy. I still recommend doing plenty of comparison shopping as different retailers might be offering different deals and discounts on various models.