Nvidia RTX 3000 Launch Fail? Scalpers Take Over Charging Up to $2,924.97 for a $1,499 GPU

Urian B., Tech Times 02 March 2021, 10:03 pm

With the recent difficulty in buying the PS5 and Xbox Series X, another price hike has added fuel to the fire when it comes to buyers' responses to the price hike in the Nvidia RTX 3000 models. While the GPUs were supposed to launch at affordable to premium prices, scalpers have reportedly been reselling the GPUs starting from premium to extra premium prices.

Nvidia RTX 3000 series price hike

(Photo : Screenshot From JayzTwoCents YouTube)
Nvidia RTX 3000 Launch Fail? Scalpers Take Over Charging Up to $2,924.97 for a $1,499 GPU

According to the story by PC Mag, scalpers last mid-September have reportedly been reselling the Nvidia RTX 3080 on Ebay for a price ranging from $1,300 to $1,500. This is almost double the original SRP of $699 up to $869 depending on the said model.

A certain engineer by the name of Michael Driscoll has been tracking data regarding GPU sales over on eBay using a certain computer script. He then told the interested buyers on Tuesday that the median prices for the said Nvidia RTX 3080 has now reached a whopping $2,069.

Scalpers on eBay

The median prices on eBay for a number of different Nvidia RTX 3000 GPUs actually started to balloon back in February. In the recent case of the Nvidia RTX 3080, the cost has shot up to a whopping $2,400. The Nvidia RTX 3070 has also peaked over $1,200.

The numbers only reportedly started dropping some time last week during the exact same time that Nvidia had launched what was said to be its most affordable entry to the whole RTX 3000 series, the new NVidia RTX 3060 supposedly starting at $329. Driscoll then noted that the prices stopped going up when the said Nvidia RTX 3060 had launched. He then noted that that couldn't be a coincidence.

Prices for GPUs go up 25%

Although it was not a huge drop, he noted that it was significant. He then said that as for the increases, he has no way of actually being able to confirm this. However, he said that he knows a number of employers that give the said year-end bonuses in February and that a lot of people are all starting to file as well as receive tax returns. He pointed towards those reasons as to what could be driving some of the price increase.

eBay prices have also reportedly gone up as even GPU vendors like EVGA, Asus, MSI have increased the prices for their GPUs to rising component costs as well as a 25% tariff for Chinese imports. Another said possible factor is the supported surge in cryptomining. This could be creating even more customers for the selling scalpers over on eBay.

Thinking about buyers willing to pay over $2,000 for not a PC but just a GPU is still pretty mind boggling. An article by TechRadar covers how another Nvidia chip might be coming out of retirement for Cryptocurrency Miners according to an EEC filing. The Nvidia GTX 1060 might be miners' top pick GPU.