Graphics Card Prices Tank in China Weeks After Ethereum Merge

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Ethereum’s long-await­ed tran­si­tion to proof-of-stake has fur­ther impact­ed graph­ics card mar­kets since they can no longer be used to mine the asset.

Prices for graph­ics pro­cess­ing units (GPUs) have fall­en to their ‘low­est lev­el ever’ in Chi­na fol­low­ing the Ethereum Merge ear­li­er this month. Graph­ics card ven­dors in Chi­na have report­ed reel­ing prices for mid and high-end units over the past two months accord­ing to the SCMP.

When ETH could be mined, and the bull mar­ket was in full swing, demand for Nvidia’s flag­ship GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090 mod­els saw rec­om­mend­ed retail prices tripling. How­ev­er, accord­ing to mer­chants in Shanghai’s elec­tron­ics retail mar­ket, demand and prices have slumped almost 40% over the past three months.

Chinese GPU glut

Accord­ing to one mer­chant, dur­ing the min­ing peak peo­ple from the min­ing com­pa­nies walked into the stores with cash and took away all the graph­ics cards. “But now look at the stores. No one is buy­ing new com­put­ers because of the coro­n­avirus, not to men­tion those who want to install a new graph­ics card,” he added.

Anoth­er mer­chant said that prices for some mod­els had now dropped below their rec­om­mend­ed retail price. Chi­nese e‑commerce plat­forms have also seen mer­chants drop prices on high-end graph­ics cards in a bid to sell them on.

There is also a thriv­ing sec­ond-hand mar­ket for graph­ics cards but gamers remain reluc­tant to buy a card that has been used for cryp­to min­ing as they run close to full capac­i­ty 24 hours a day which stress­es the com­po­nents. “I don’t think any PC users will want them, but it is dif­fi­cult to tell from the out­side whether it was a min­ing card,” said the merchant.

The counter argu­ment is that cards used for min­ing run in a steady state with con­stant volt­ages and ample cool­ing which is bet­ter for the hard­ware than tem­per­a­ture and pow­er fluc­tu­a­tions from gaming.

Gamers rejoice

Now that the cryp­to min­ing hype is over (for now any­way), PC gamers have a rea­son to cel­e­brate as graph­ics cards are now more afford­able. How­ev­er, sup­ply chain dis­rup­tions have result­ed in prices remain­ing ele­vat­ed in the west where graph­ics cards are still in high demand.

Anoth­er fac­tor that could drop prices even fur­ther is the prod­uct line evo­lu­tion and new mod­els hit­ting the mar­ket. Last week, Nvidia announced its RTX 4000 series graph­ics card line which will hit the stores on Oct. 12. These units will not be cheap, how­ev­er, with the TX 4090 mod­el car­ry­ing a hefty retail price of $1,600.

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