A photo of RTX 3060s sold by a seller in Pakistan for $ 750 USD.
NVIDIA’s upcoming RTX 3060 was an excellent value proposition. With 3584 CUDA cores, the performance was firmly positioned between the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti, and its suggested retail price of $ 329 made it one of the best bang for your buck. Unfortunately for gamers, GPUs continue to gain momentum for most in 2021. Some European retailers have already marked the card for over $ 600 USD (EUR 499), which is almost twice the premium over NVIDIA’s MSRP and 50% over the official European MSRP.
European retailers are raising prices of the upcoming RTX 3060 by nearly 50% over the official EU MSRP
The price hike was spotted by Videocardz user The Determinator and posted by WhyCry. While NVIDIA tries to force suppliers to adhere to its MSRP by allocating cards to suppliers who will pre-order with MSRP, retailers have adopted the tactic of canceling said pre-orders and forcing customers to re-order at inflated prices. You can argue here that NVIDIA cannot actually do anything else in this situation while staying under the rules of a free market. While it may limit or restrict future supply to these sellers “at will”, they cannot be seen to be enforcing pricing terms on a retailer (which would be against the law).
Some retailers in Europe have even raised the prices of the RTX 3060 to a whopping $ 835 USD (or $ 689 EUR), which is absolutely insane considering it’s nearly three times the original suggested retail price right now. In the before and after screenshots comparison, you can see that the initial (already high) prices of the RTX 3060 versus the new exorbitant prices on PCDIGA – a European store:
We’ve heard that the RTX 3060 will have the most allocation of NVIDIA’s entire 3000 series to date, but given the booming cryptocurrency (and mining) market and insane demand for GPUs, it’s hard to get see how the free market won’t keep driving up the prices of this incredibly valuable silicon. The sad fact of 2021 is that gamers just aren’t as lucrative a customer for retailers as miners – and as long as there is demand at these exorbitant rates, retailers will continue to flag it.
We’ve already seen Pakistani retailers selling the RTX 3060 (which hasn’t even launched yet!) For $ 750 USD and it’s hard to see how things will improve anytime soon given the current limited supply environment. The only glimmer of hope for gamers seems to be built in, where you can regularly find bounties of just 10% – which is next to nothing in 2021. Buying a pre-built version may be the only way gamers get their hands on some GPUs this year. can get. major OEMs such as HP, Dell, and Alienware have the resources (and willpower) to enforce reasonable MSRPs.
Brick and mortar stores may also be making a comeback, as scalping through bots is impossible at scale in the real world and you can get a decent pre-fabricated pre-build at the best buy. As prices go up, it can even be cheaper to just buy pre-builts and sell the components you don’t want, rather than buying a GPU directly.