GPU Prices Free Fall, But You Shouldn’t Buy Now [July 2018 Update]

Graphics card prices have gone down since miners stopped buying them, but not far enough so that they’d be considered good deals again. Nvidia is readying their next generation GeForce lineup that is expected to launch soon, and who even knows what AMD is planning at the moment.

The point is that the GPU market is in a strange place right now and it’s hard to make sense out of all of it. In this post, we take a quick look at the GPU prices and try to understand what’s actually going on here.

GPU Prices Review: AMD Radeon and Nvidia GTX 10 Series

We previously predicted that amid the declining crypto mining demand, GPU prices will continue to fall from the ridiculous heights we saw just a few months ago. This is why we haven’t really recommended picking any of them up during that time.

But, have prices actually gotton better over the last few months or are they still disguising as real deals? The best way to investigate this is to review the MSRP of some of the most popular cards.

Kicking things off, we have the Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti which launched at $139, the GTX 1060 6GB at $249, the GTX 1070 at $379, and the GTX 1080 Ti which you could have picked up for $699.

For AMD, we have the Radeon RX 570 4GB priced at $169 at launch, the RX 580 8GB at $229, and the Vega 56 and 64 coming in at $399 and $499 respectively.

Now all of us know that these prices didn’t stick for very long and some cards even peaked more than double their MSRP around the start of this year. Thankfully, as we reported a few months ago, prices had started to drop from said high significantly along with mining interest and profitability.

Back in April, you could pick a GTX 1050 Ti for $190, 1060 for $330, 1070 for $490 and a 1080 Ti for around $1027. At the time, AMD’s RX 570 4GB was selling for $298, RX 580 8GB for $350, RX Vega 56 for around $796, and the big brother Vega 64 could be found for $870.

Well absolutely, none of those prices were reasonable especially in case of the GTX 1080 Ti and the ludicrously priced Vegas, but they weren’t at least nearly as inflated as they were a few months before. This is when we were seeing the 1080 Ti costing over $1200.

So how depressing are prices right now? Well as it turns out, they are somewhere in the middle.

If you check online, you’ll be able to find the GTX 1050 Ti for $170, which is about 10% lower than what it was back in April. A GTX 1060 6GB is currently available for $279 with a 15% price drop, while a GTX 1070 sets you back $409, which is about 17% lower than in April. The 1080 Ti can be found for a massive 29% lower price of $730.

The red team isn’t immune to the similarly impressive price drops. We spotted an RX 570 4GB online selling for 90% less than in April at $240. The beefy RX 580 8GB is selling for 23% less at $270. The biggest offenders of the bunch, the Vega twins, also saw huge price reductions. The Vega 56 can be found for $530 showing a 33% drop, while the Vega 64 is 32% down at $590.

Clearly, the impact of mining on GPU prices has been drastically fading over the months after the whole crypto price correction so much so that many of our favorite cards are actually looking pretty attrative again.

That being said, we still recommend that you don’t go pick one of these up even at these more seductive prices. None of the cards we looked at were selling for MSRP or lower. You might be able to find them on sale, but it’s not a general rule. Buying cards for the current selling price just makes no sense to us.

Everything we’ve seen so far indicates that the prices will likely continue to fall in the coming months, and even more when Nvidia does finally unveil their next-gen offerings. There are remarkably few reasons not to wait until at least then before pulling the trigger on a new card; even getting a GTX 10-series card when the 11-series comes out makes a ton of sense.

The only reason to consider a card right now is if it is massively discounted to below MSRP or your GPU actually blows up and you have nothing else to put back in your system. You could potentially buy something on the low end to tide you over while you save up for a next-gen card.