For DIY players and gamers alike, the most important thing you want right now is a good graphics card. From work to life, whether it is doing picture editing, video rendering, special effects production, or watching high-definition movies and television, playing AAA masterpieces, you need a graphics card with excellent performance, and Nvidia's RTX 30 series graphics card and AMD RX 6000 series graphics card have naturally become the purchase targets of players.
Due to the strong demand for cryptocurrency mining, today's graphics card prices have completely broken through the psychological bottom line of most netizens and players. Even when the state controls, the mine is extinguished, and the mining boom tends to flatten or even begin to decline, graphics card manufacturers still maintain a high price, which also makes many ordinary users and gamers unable to get their favorite graphics cards.
The good news is that in recent times, there have been frequent news that the price of high-performance graphics cards is about to plunge in a large area. According to the news of foreign media Tom's Hardware, ASUS plans to adjust the retail price of RTX 30 series graphics cards from April 1, from entry-level graphics cards to flagship graphics cards are within the price reduction range, up to a maximum reduction of up to 25%, and other board manufacturers MSI and GIGABYTE also said that they have plans to follow up on price reductions.
According to Xiao Lei's visit to merchants, the current high-end graphics card quotations in the global supply chain are all falling. Affected by this, the current domestic mainstream e-commerce platform, second-hand trading platform graphics card prices are also declining in an all-round way, after several years of graphics card price surge trend is coming to an end. What exactly led the attack of this mining disaster, is now the best time to buy a graphics card?
Graphics cards with crazy price drops
This time the arrival of the mine tide caught everyone off guard.
You know, a month ago, the price level of the entire graphics card market was still at a high level. At that time, the players demanded a large number of mid-range graphics cards, the price increase was actually nearly doubled, the RTX 3060 listed at the beginning of last year, even if it is the version of the lock computing power, there is no 4500 yuan at all, the RTX 3050 that has just been listed has been speculated from the official reference price of 1899 yuan to nearly 3000 yuan, and even has to make an appointment to snap up.
Now, just a month later, the situation in the graphics card market has changed dramatically. Yes, but are you sure you want to buy it now?" Now to buy a graphics card you need to pay a deposit first, there is no spot. In the exchange with the familiar boss, Xiao Lei learned that in order to prevent the value of the graphics card from collapsing, many offline merchants have sold all the high-end graphics cards on hand at a discount some time ago.
In addition to the offline computer city shops, the price of graphics cards on online e-commerce platforms and second-hand trading platforms has also declined.
Through a shopping comparison platform, we can see that the price of a brand's RTX 3060 LHR has reached 3199 yuan, the price of RTX 3070Ti LHR has reached 4799 yuan, and the price of RTX 3080 has also come to 6199 yuan, and the price of these graphics cards has basically remained at about twice the level, even the double eleven price has not bottomed out, until recently reached a historical low.
At the same time, since March this year, a large number of sellers selling mining graphics cards have suddenly appeared on idle fish. Taking the commonly used mining graphics cards RX580, RTX 1660 and RX5700XT as an example, the second-hand prices of these three graphics cards reached 2800 yuan, 3000 yuan and 6000 yuan last year, respectively, and now the prices of the three have fallen to about 900 yuan, 1300 yuan and 3200 yuan respectively.
In addition to these mining cards with obvious mining behavior, the price of conventional second-hand locked graphics cards is also declining, and the RTX 3060-LHR version, which is popular with mainstream players, has now dropped to 3299 yuan. Many second-hand graphics cards have just been listed, which has attracted many buyers who have come to inquire, and many individual players want to take advantage of this graphics card price reduction to quickly "pick up a leak" and complete their "installation business".
The graphics card market is gradually calming down
So, what's wrong with the graphics card market? Why does a "stiff" graphics card suddenly collapse?
Personally, I believe that the decline in the price of graphics cards during this period is inseparable from two factors. First of all, as we all know, the "mining tide" triggered by virtual currency is a major factor that promotes the price of graphics cards to rise to a high level.
Nowadays, as the regulatory authorities of various countries begin to standardize the governance of virtual currency mining projects, the scale of global mining farms is gradually decreasing, coupled with the previous Russian-Ukrainian war, the so-called "decentralized" virtual currency reflects its unstable value, which has also led to a decline in the price of many NFTs and virtual currencies, resulting in a continuous decline in the cryptocurrency market.
Not only that, according to industry insiders, the current Ethereum testnet has been successfully merged, transitioning from the traditional PoW to the Proof of Stake mechanism, which is expected to be fully launched in June-July this year. The launch of the consensus mechanism represents that Ethereum's blockchain security will transition from expensive power-consuming mining hardware to relying on pledge tokens, miners will not be able to continue to mine Ethereum through graphics cards, and some miners will sell graphics cards in advance, resulting in an increase in the supply of the graphics card market, and the price of second-hand graphics cards will naturally continue to decline.
Secondly, the addition of new players is also a key factor in the price reduction of graphics cards. On March 30, Intel officially released the Intel Iris ARC series of mobile discrete graphics, and brought us a limited edition of arc series desktop graphics, it is reported that the card will use 32 Xe core + 16GB video memory design, performance close to the RTX 3070Ti level, the price is even surprising.
Not only that, but there is news that NVIDIA is about to release a new generation of RTX40 series graphics cards in the third quarter of this year. It is reported that the series will use the new Ada Lovelace graphics architecture, based on TSMC 5nm process to build, of which the most entry-level core AD102 at 1.8GHz FP32 performance of about 66.5T, and even expected to surpass the RTX 3080 single-precision floating point performance, process improvement is expected to make NVIDIA's new generation of graphics card performance soar.
The upcoming release of various new products makes dealers in the market dare not continue to hold the inventory of old goods for a long time, which is also a key factor in the collapse of graphics card prices.
Is this a good time to start a graphics card?
The question is, is this a good time to start a graphics card?
On the one hand, if your installed configuration is already ready for everything, only one graphics card is missing, it is obviously not a problem to start with a graphics card now. Judging from the current situation of major e-commerce platforms, Tmall Mall and Jingdong Mall have already appeared a lot of original price graphics cards, if you can accept personal repairs, Pinduoduo has appeared on a lot of price-breaking graphics cards.
On the other hand, if you already have a graphics card and are just waiting for the opportunity to upgrade your graphics card, then you don't have to worry. According to industry insiders, the recent rectification of mining across the country is still increasing, there are small computing power retail households have been door-to-door seizure, domestic mining activities will become the past, it is expected that there will be more mining cards back to the market in the future, the graphics card market will inevitably face oversupply.
Whatever the reason behind the decline in graphics card prices, it is obviously good news for the average consumer. In the case that the bubble in the graphics card market has been punctured, consumers may wish to wait, the price of graphics cards may have surprises, and the revival of the DIY market seems to be not far away. But for merchants, the carnival of "lying down to make money" brought about by the mining tide has temporarily passed.