Thursday, January 28th 2021
Graphics Card Prices Could Soar Amid Increasing Memory Prices
The prices of graphics cards have been perhaps the most controversial topic among PC enthusiasts lately. High demand and low supply of the latest generation GPUs have lead to the massive price increase over MSRP. Graphics card makers, AMD and NVIDIA, have already announced that this situation is not going to get better until March ends. However, there seems to be another possible issue appearing slowly on the horizon. According to the Chinese website MyDrivers, the prices of graphics cards are expected to increase thanks to the increasing prices of memory used in them, presumably including both the slower GDDR6 and the faster GDDR6X memory.
The source claims that the new memory price increase is going to take place after February 12th, when Chinese New Year ends. As both the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3000 series Ampere generation and AMD Radeon 6000 series generation use GDDR6X and GDDR6 respectively, that means that the increased prices of these memory types could increase the MSRP, which is already above its original intent.
Sources:
MyDrivers, via Hardware Info
The source claims that the new memory price increase is going to take place after February 12th, when Chinese New Year ends. As both the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3000 series Ampere generation and AMD Radeon 6000 series generation use GDDR6X and GDDR6 respectively, that means that the increased prices of these memory types could increase the MSRP, which is already above its original intent.
85 Comments on Graphics Card Prices Could Soar Amid Increasing Memory Prices
I get that chips are more and more complex and thus more expensive to design and produce. But the platform the chip is placed on didn't change much over the last 10 years. No matter if you look at Mainboard structure/materials or GPU boards. Yes, they got more layers. Yes, they got more lines and capacitors. But looking at the upper middle class you don't get that much more functionality from a brand new z590 board compared to a z170/z270 for instance (how many more sata-slots do you have? how many more M.2? Oh, yeah. A new PCIE-Standard.... that's worth .... something? :D ;) ). The same for GPU's. Neither the board design itself nor the way they are produced changed massively in the last 10 years and the "how do I get capazitators on this board and the lanes I need to connect them in between the layers" should have drastically improved in the same timeframe. Even designing the boards can't be that expensive anymore, as most of that is done by AMD/Nvidia and just adapted to the specific needs of the board partner. Takes some time, some manpower, some SW-Licences to get it done. After that it's assembly which still works not much different than it did 5 years ago.
In general besides the chips (and thus licencing fees / the cost of the chips on the MB or GPU - including RAM) the costs of production should have gone down massively and thus the prices of mid/high end mainboards/gpus should have stayed in a range of +10 to +25% of their all time prices and not artificially blow up like a woman after you take 30 seconds to answer the question "does this make me look fat?" (upper mid-range mainboards had been at ~200€ and high end started at ~300€ for instance - with z590 we START with the low end somewhere between 200-300€ and go up to 1k € for a MAINBOARD! ... it's bad enough that GPU's are in that price-range which should top out at max 700-800€ for "deluxe aqua" designs but mainboards now, too?).
Oh, that's fine. Their prices were too low so far, and we needed some adjustment
:)
maybe things will get more to sane level by the end of this year.