Retailers and board partners are stuck on RTX 3000 GPUs: will prices continue to fall?

Sebastian Schenzinger

In his latest video, the YouTuber Moore’s Law Is Dead draws attention to the precarious situation that Nvidia’s board partners and retailers are currently in. According to this, the warehouses should be filled to the brim, which could become a big problem given the falling demand and the upcoming release of new products. This should have positive consequences for end customers, namely further falling GPU prices.

Graphics card comparison 2022: GeForce RTX and Radeon RX GPUs in the test – with ranking

Large supply meets falling demand

The fact that the MSRP of a product is just a placeholder and that the actual value is determined by the relationship between supply and demand has been a painful experience for many potential graphics card buyers over the past two years. Poor availability and completely exorbitant prices were the order of the day. However, due to strong inflation, the collapse of cryptocurrencies and oversaturation of the market, the demand for PC hardware has fallen sharply, as we report in this post. As YouTuber “Moore’s Law Is Dead” found out, many board partners and retailers fear that they will be left with their goods.

The choice of words used by the board partners makes it clear what a precarious situation they are in:

“This month we told Nvidia that they can go where the pepper grows. We don’t intend to buy any more Ampere or Turing stock until we’ve sold our existing stock. At this point, we’re even willing to accept the allocation of Lovelace risk if they threaten us.”

The main reason for the drastic choice of words is not only due to the full warehouses, but above all to the fact that the dealers are left with their goods in the worst case. Due to the sharp slump in cryptocurrencies, more and more mining graphics cards are entering the used market, especially in Asia, which, in combination with falling demand, is causing prices to fall sharply.

“Nvidia underestimated how desperate we’ve gotten. Until now. They’re finally working with us on a solution to sell off as much inventory as possible before Lovelace launches in October. BTW – the overwhelming majority of used mining graphics cards have the West not even reached. We need to get rid of the new graphics cards NOW!”

So the manufacturers know very well that the market will soon be flooded with used mining graphics cards, which could make it impossible to sell the Ampere and Turing GPUs that are still in stock.

“Well, over here (ASIA) miners are definitely selling off most of their holdings. I expect these maps to be flooding the west in a few weeks.”

Declining prices for end customers and possible delay of Ada Lovelace

One way to help retailers and board partners with sales is for Nvidia to postpone the launch of Ada Lovelace. This is exactly what the usually well-informed interprets

Greymon55
in his July 15 tweet. According to this, only the AD102 graphics chip can be expected in 2022, which should be used in the RTX 4090 Ti and the RTX 4090. AD103, AD104 and AD106 in the form of the RTX 4080, RTX 4070 and RTX 4060 should not follow until 2023.

Game bundle and falling recommended prices to boost sales

Another step is to make the current offer more attractive. From now on, all buyers of an RTX 3080 (Ti) or RTX 3090 (Ti) GPU will receive a game bundle from Ghostwire: Tokyo and DOOM Eternal including both expansions. Furthermore, Nvidia is said to have significantly reduced the prices compared to the board partners, at least for the top models, which has also made itself felt in the online retailers in this country. The RRP for the top models is now as follows: