The mining period and GPU scarcity is perhaps over, however scalpers are nonetheless making chaos within the GPU market. Scalpers have gone to city on Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4090, promoting playing cards at properly over MSRP on eBay (opens in new tab) — with some playing cards priced at $4000 and better.
eBay scalper listings begin at $2,299, and most costs sit within the $2500 to $3200 vary. On the excessive finish, we have seen them listed as excessive as $4,499 — although a lot of the offered listings are within the $2500 vary (our colleagues at PCGamer did some math and located that about 135 items have been offered yesterday, with a mean promoting worth of $2,524).
However what’s particularly loopy is that lots of the RTX 4090 listings are pre-order listings. This implies the vendor does not bodily have the GPU — and you will have to attend for the vendor to get the cardboard from the retailer they purchased it from earlier than they will even ship it to you (and that is assuming nothing goes improper).
It seems like individuals are shopping for, although — the 135 offered yesterday account for a couple of third of the listings. The RTX 4090 went on sale yesterday — and offered out instantly, so determined prospects don’t have any alternative however to pay the scalped markup or look forward to restocks.
Scalpers shopping for up RTX 4090s is not stunning to see, as this has occurred at each GPU launch over the previous a number of years.
Is Nvidia Conserving Availability Low on Goal?
The GPU market is in a superb state for players, due to the decline of cryptocurrency mining. This implies there’s a probability Nvidia needs to stifle RTX 40 collection availability — not less than for a short while, as Nvidia and its AIB companions are sitting on a mountain of unsold RTX 30 collection playing cards. For this reason we’re seeing fairly massive worth reductions on high-end RTX 30 collection GPUs for the time being.
Nvidia additionally overbought a ton of TSMC 4N silicon on the top of the GPU scarcity final yr. This can pressure the corporate to attempt to take advantage of revenue off of silicon by promoting playing cards on the highest costs attainable, giving Nvidia much more incentive to maintain availability low.
Even when Nvidia is protecting provide artificially low, we doubt the corporate will stifle the market as badly because the GPU scarcity of 2020 and 2021. However we suspect availability will take a while to return to regular for the RTX 4090, in addition to the RTX 4080 16GB and the RTX 4080 12GB after they launch later this yr.
