The growth of cryptocurrency rates has led to another round of video card shortages. Not only the latest GeForce RTX 3000 and Radeon RX 6000 series cards have disappeared from the sale, but also solutions from previous generations. Only budget video cards remained on store shelves, which do not stay on sale even despite the rise in prices. This was noticed “Vedomosti».
The current situation in the video card market resembles the 2017 crypto fever. A sharp surge in demand for graphics cards was provoked by miners. Ethereum, the main cryptocurrency that is mined using graphics accelerators, has more than tripled in the past three months. It now exceeds $ 1200. As a result, the payback periods for graphics cards used in mining have dropped to several months. For example, the GeForce RTX 3080 can bring its owner about $ 6, and the GeForce RX 3060 Ti or Radeon RX 5700 – around $ 4 per day.
It is not surprising that in such a situation, miners have also been added to gamers who have been chasing new-generation video cards for several months, with the only difference that purchases from cryptocurrency miners are much larger. According to Vedomosti, miners have recently been buying video cards in batches of 1000 or more directly from suppliers and devices do not have time to get into stores. Sellers note an increase in demand for video cards by about 4.5 times and complain that all new arrivals are sold out instantly, which is why any somewhat productive options have disappeared from the open sale.
For example, in the shops of the DNS network, you can only buy a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti or Radeon RX 550, but no video cards with higher performance are available. The Regard store offers a choice of GeForce GTX 1050 Ti or GeForce GT 1030, but nothing can offer those who are looking for something better. And the most powerful video card in the assortment of the federal network “Citylink” is the GeForce GT 1030. It is worth noting that last week there were still limited quantities of GeForce GTX 1650 and GeForce GTX 1660 Ti on sale, but now they are over.
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Unsurprisingly, the remaining GeForce GTX 1050 Ti are sold at overpriced prices. In the fall of last year, such video cards were sold on average for 10-12 thousand rubles, but now prices have grown to 13-14 thousand rubles, but this is not the clearest illustration for today’s situation. Obviously, those small arrivals of new graphics cards that will appear on the shelves will diverge at significantly inflated prices.
The described situation is typical not only for the Russian market. Video cards are not available in other regions as well. Neither the American Newegg.com nor Amazon.com can offer anything better than the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti at the moment. Various small North American sellers have separate models, but the prices are one and a half to two times higher than usual. For example, the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is often sold for $ 450-500, while the Radeon RX 5600 XT can easily cost $ 550-600.
In Europe, the situation is somewhat better, where you can still buy accelerators of the level of the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti or even the Radeon RX 5600 XT at not too high prices. However, more productive models are either absent or very expensive. For example, prices for the available GeForce RTX 3070 start at € 750-800.
As market participants comment, the rush of demand from miners has seriously aggravated the already not very favorable situation in the video card market. According to producers’ forecasts, the deficit will remain at least until the end of the first half of the year. And if earlier we talked mainly about underdelivery of new and productive video cards, now we are talking about all price segments.
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