Video cards have become considerably more expensive in the past year, which affects PC gamers, among others. Will those high prices change soon? Experts expect it to, and that has everything to do with cryptocurrencies. The sharp drop in the ethereum price, combined with the challenges of mining the crypto, is putting some pressure on the extremely high prices of graphics cards from both Nvidia and AMD.
Earlier in January, Nvidia increased the prices of its Founders Edition video cards in Europe by as much as 6%. These are the cards that Nvidia itself markets. A more expensive dollar compared to the euro may partly be the reason for the price increase, but especially the extremely high demand for graphics cards has been causing the extreme prices for a long time.
Despite this particular case, in which Nvidia is pushing prices even further, there seems to be positive news for PC gamers. Several experts have seen no significant differences in the retail prices of graphics cards in the past two months.
According to reports from the German 3DCenter there is even more reason for optimism, as prices even fell here and there in the first weeks of January. AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT, in particular, became cheaper.
Falling cryptocurrency leads to lower prices
The decline of many cryptocurrencies such as etherium and a ban on mining digital coins in various parts of the world have made it a lot less interesting to mine crypto coins. Video cards are used for this process, which are therefore less popular due to the latest developments.
Meanwhile, the suggested retail price of AMD graphics cards is approximately 67% above the suggested retail price, while Nvidia GPUs are 77% more expensive than the suggested retail price. Nevertheless, prices have come down from the high level in October last year. Newer graphics cards such as the Nvidia RTX 3050 and the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT have not only become less attractive to miners, the cards are already being marketed for a lower price.
Ethereum is by far the most popular cryptocurrency to mine with video cards, but it is getting harder every month to mine the digital currency. There are also other coins that can be mined with video cards, but they don’t bring in nearly as much money as ethereum. All this will mean that miners will want to sell their graphics cards in the near future in order to recoup part of their investments.
All in all, there seems to be a lot of green light for a drop in video card prices, and that would certainly be about time.
â€