High-end GeForce RTX 3000 models are getting price cuts
Prices for Nvidia’s high-end GeForce RTX 3090 Ti GPU started to drop last week. Reports are coming in that Nvidia is also discounting a number of other models as well, and developments in e-tailers seem to confirm this. So it’s looking more and more like the the rumours of large Ampere cards excess stock aren’t completely off the mark. The discounts are probably an attempt to get rid of these GPUs before the next generation arrives.
The information about the price cuts comes from the Benchlife.info website. It reports, citing its own internal sources, that the coming discounts are not just an isolated sales decided by distributors or card manufacturers, but are directly coordinated by Nvidia. They wre supposedly set to start taking effect last week, which fits with what we’ve already started to see in the case of the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti pricing, even in our own backwaters.
According to Benchlife, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti’s price is supposed to be reduced from $1999 to $1499, which is pretty consistent with the discounts we’ve already noticed. Since the previous report, several stores have already reduced the prices of some models (MSI, but also Gigabyte) to some 1750–1800 EUR, which pretty much corresponds to this new US price.
At the same time, the GeForce RTX 3090, which previously cost $1499, is also supposed to become cheaper. Here, though, it will be a less dramatic discount, just to $1299. In our country, this would correspond to a price of 1570 EUR. The new price seems to also be confirmed by the offers of Czech etailers, who have also started to list cards for these, if not even lower prices.
The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti‘s recommended price is also supposed to go down, but the cut is even smaller in its case, merely from $1199 to $1099, i.e. by less than 10 %. For us, this would mean a price of 1330 EUR.
What we already wrote last time probably still applie.: These models were priced very high before the discounts. If we look at it with the previous decade as a reference point, these cards were very expensive. Even after these discounts, they don’t seem to be much of a bargain, especially in the case of the 3090 and 3090 Ti models. The new generation of GPUs is due to arrive this fall, and its high-end models are expected to see a performance increases of up to a 100 %. Thus, there should probably be significant advances in the mainstream cards as well.
It’s almost certain that if you wait four more months, you’ll get a much better card than the RTX 3080 Ti for 1200 EUR. And also, the price of these older cards will probably continue to drop over time too. This doesn’t just apply to Nvidia though, we can say the same for the $900–1100 Radeon RX 6900 XT and 6950 XT cards by AMD.
The 12GB RTX 3080 model has an official sticker price for the first time
In addition to the previous models, there’ll be a possible discount of the GeForce RTX 3080 12GB card, which might be a model that starts to make more sense to think about. More specifically, Nvidia is said to be assigning a recommended price to this card for the very first time, which the model didn’t have until now (which was probably because it was selling for inflated money at the time of the crypto-craze). Now the card is said – if Benchlife is right – to cost $799 (967 EUR). So it will theoretically cost an extra $100 in return for 2 GB of extra memory (and slightly higher performance), versus the standard GeForce RTX 3080 10GB model. However, the latter won’t be discounted, unlike the more expensive cards, and remains officially priced at $699.
No other lower-end models (RTX 3070, RTX 3070 Ti, RTX 3060/3060 Ti) are expected to receive an official price cut at this time either, according to Benchlife. So these discounts will probably be disappointing for some, given how we are nearly two years from launch, and yet a “sale” has only eroded the worst cases of previous overpricing for the most expensive models (and it can probably be argued that the overpricing hasn’t really been eliminated entirely). But when it comes those cards of the more sensible tiers, pretty much nothing has changed.
Of course, these are only official MSRP values and the market itself can still push the real etail prices lower, which is something we are perhaps already witnessing. So even we can still hope for some price cuts even with lower-tier graphics cards. In our country, their prices are still in the process of falling back towards the original recommended price after the previous cryptoboom hikes rather than going under the MSRPs. But the global situation is that the prices are going down, so perhaps it’s just a matter of weeks before even mainstream cards start selling for lower than the officially recommended prices.
According to Benchlife, the aforementioned discounts might yet be officially announced by Nvidia as well. But so far that doesn’t seem to have happened yet. The company’s website still shows the old high prices for now. So it’s possible that while the discounts were truly ordered from “the officials”, there will be no official announcement of these new recommended prices.
Sources: Benchlife, VideoCardz
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
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