Graphic Cards – Suddenly Available
Since the Chinese government put its foot down on the bitcoin industry, a few things have changed. Aside from the price of bitcoin itself, which had increased from 32,782 to a peak of 63,314 on April 15 and then dropped into the ~ 33,000 range when the ‘announcements’ were made (currently back up to 46,644 or thereabouts today), the price of graphics cards, which are used by bitcoin miners to generate hash calculations that create bitcoin, have also changed. Those cards, which are also necessary for display monitors, particularly gaming and content creation, had seen massive price increases to the point where two or three year old used cards were being offered at premium prices on Amazon and current cards were simply unavailable. Component shortages for some parts did play into this to some degree, as they have for many other CE devices, but the driver here was demand from miners who were desperate to add capacity, especially in locations (such as China) where the energy to run such bitcoin farms was low.
In our note on 6/21/21 we showed a table we developed that showed the declines seen in graphic card prices in late June after the Chinese crackdown. In that table the average price decline across all of the models we tracked was 21.6%, still 30.7% above the average low price for the composite group. Rather than add current data to the set, we offer a chart or two to show how those prices have moved since our examination, based on 3rd party offerings on Amazon (AMZN). Fig. 1 shows an Nvidia (NVDA) GeForce RTX 3060 based card from ASUS (2357.TT) that was selling for $1,039 on 6/21, down 13.4% from its peak price of $1,200, and is now selling at $834, now down 30.5% from its peak and 19.7% lower than when we showed the data. On the positive side, it is up 11.2% from its low reached on July 20.
Fig. 2 shows another card, this one based on AMD’s (AMD) Radeon RX chipset that saw a peak of $1,918 on May 25, and was at $1,202 when we checked in June, already down 37.3% from its peak. Based on today’s price of $1,077, down 43.8% from its peak and another 10.4% from June, things have not seem to recover for this model. .. Others look basically the same with some at new lows and some having recovered slightly, and suddenly availability, especially from 3rd party sources, is considerably better than in June. Fig. 3 shows another example of supply and demand…
In our note on 6/21/21 we showed a table we developed that showed the declines seen in graphic card prices in late June after the Chinese crackdown. In that table the average price decline across all of the models we tracked was 21.6%, still 30.7% above the average low price for the composite group. Rather than add current data to the set, we offer a chart or two to show how those prices have moved since our examination, based on 3rd party offerings on Amazon (AMZN). Fig. 1 shows an Nvidia (NVDA) GeForce RTX 3060 based card from ASUS (2357.TT) that was selling for $1,039 on 6/21, down 13.4% from its peak price of $1,200, and is now selling at $834, now down 30.5% from its peak and 19.7% lower than when we showed the data. On the positive side, it is up 11.2% from its low reached on July 20.
Fig. 2 shows another card, this one based on AMD’s (AMD) Radeon RX chipset that saw a peak of $1,918 on May 25, and was at $1,202 when we checked in June, already down 37.3% from its peak. Based on today’s price of $1,077, down 43.8% from its peak and another 10.4% from June, things have not seem to recover for this model. .. Others look basically the same with some at new lows and some having recovered slightly, and suddenly availability, especially from 3rd party sources, is considerably better than in June. Fig. 3 shows another example of supply and demand…
ASUS Nvidia Ge Force RTX 3060 Graphics Card Price Chart - Source: Amazon
ASUS ROG Radeon RX 6700 Graphics Card Pricing - Source: Amazon
Mooch the Cat - Source: Mutts.com - courtesy King Features
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