DO NOT PAY THIS MUCH FOR THIS GPU
It’s no secret to readers, listeners, and viewers of OLIP that I have wanted to upgrade my graphics card for a little over a year now. I have a Radeon RX 590. It’s not an urgent need that I upgrade, it’s fine. But I am finally in a position in my life to upgrade. Last year I waited. I waited on good deals knowing the 3000 and 6000 series from NVIDIA and Radeon were coming. I waited not knowing that the market was about to explode.
Fast forward to 2021. Anyone who has been in the market for a graphics card knows that insanely high demand (thanks pandemic), people being stuck at home getting into pc gaming, and another cryptocurrency mining boom has caused it not only to be impossible to find mid to high-end gaming cards, but if you do they will cost a pretty penny above MSRP- sometimes even double! Top-end 6900 xt and RTX 3090 cards are going for $2000 and higher.
I have signed up for auto-notifications for several sites in my quest to get my hands on an RX 6800 xt or an RTX 3080- whichever one I can find. Hell, I would settle for the slightly lower tier 6800 or 3070. Just something a bit more modern. So today as I sit at work, just as I start my lunch break, I see an email come through. It’s Newegg recommending some graphics cards to me. Curious if one of the, possibly make-believe, cards I seek has suddenly become available I open it, and I find this:
Newegg recommends that I look into a 1660 SUPER. Not a bad card, but not the upgrade I’m looking for. So I go to close the email, but the pricing of these cards catches my eye. The 1600 series of Nvidia cards were aimed at replacing some 1060s for those who didn’t quite want to spend more to upgrade to 2000 series cards. It’s not a bad card at all, however it’s not what I would refer to as either current or top-of-the-line. At release, it had a manufacturer suggested retail price of $229, some partners models costing closer to $300. Meaning that, at best, Newegg just suggested I spend $280 above the MSRP of a $230 card.
The market is what it is-I don’t blame companies for taking advantage of the market and making money. Graphics cards generally have a low profit margin, so opportunities like this are few and far between for them. What upsets me is that I was minding my own business, not really looking at cards and then Newegg had the audacity to recommend a $230 card priced at $900. That is a 390% mark up. There are people who don’t know much about components that might honestly think that the $654.99 card that is curently “$115 off” is actually on sale, and not almost three times the actual normal cost of that card. Cards will sell for what they sell for, but to have emails getting sent to potential clients encouraging them to spend ungodly amounts of cash on outdated parts is absurd! Maybe it’s all automated. Maybe they aren’t being predatory. Maybe. And if that’s the case they need to fix this immediately because this not only feels wrong, but it puts Newegg in a very bad light. I highly encourage people new to computers to research what these cards are supposed to cost before buying one this year because the road through GPU hell looks like it’s going to be very expensive for gamers.
-Tim
