ASUS has announced that it will be dropping the prices for almost the entirety of its NVIDIA RTX 30-series graphics card stack. The news comes on the back of finally descending channel prices for the latest GPUs, alongside the U.S. Trade Office decision last week of excluding integrated circuit boards from the added taxes in the China-US Trade War. As an ASUS representative told Tom's Hardware, users should expect an "up to 25%" price reduction to be applied throughout its RTX 30-series stack (from the RTX 3050 through the RTX 3090 Ti). Interestingly, there was no mention of AMD's graphics cards in the announcement.

After more than a year of inflated pricing, there may be a light in the tunnel - although it's becoming increasingly difficult to discern whether it's the RTX 3000-series family behind the veil or NVIDIA's next-gen solutions. No other AMD or NVIDIA board partner made a comparable announcement, but one would expect them to follow ASUS on the downward pricing trend or risk sitting in larger unsold inventories than they're comfortable with. Of course, this remains a problem for ASUS throughout the world, should the company not extend the price-cut to other regions other than the U.S.

ZOTAC's official Twitter channel has posted an image that promotes the usage of its graphics cards in mining environments. Under the caption "An army of #ZOTACGAMING GPU's hungry for coin!", the company posted an image of a cryptocurrency mining farm populated with its graphics cards. The usage of a gaming hashtag in the post just adds insult to injury, with the picture showcasing at least eight of its GeForce RTX 3070 Twin Edge graphics cards on mining duties.

Of course, for ZOTAC, its cards being re-purposed for mining isn't a make-it-or-break-it affair: the company makes money selling its products to gamers or miners alike. However, considering how global supply of the latest gaming-branded graphics cards has been constrained ever since the initial RTX 3000-series launch, it seems that this Tweet might have been a misstep on the company. It's bound to attract crosshairs towards a seemingly unjust distribution of graphics cards in the market, with several would-be users of their gaming-branded graphics cards being left out in the cold regarding the primary purpose these graphics cards are developed and marketed for: gaming. The company has in the meantime deleted the Tweet.