GPU Pricing Archives - Logical Increments Blog

Graphics Cards are Expensive in 2023 – Can Used GPUs Come to the Rescue?

Today we’re taking a look at used vs. new GPU prices, and whether buying a used graphics card is worth your while.

The “A Hit and Three Misses” Update

There have not been that many major releases recently, so this will be a small update that mostly includes items we are not adding to our chart.

And before we get to those items: All three non-added items are due to bad pricing. They are great items if they were cheaper, but we at Logical Increments would probably not recommend $100 cups of coffee either.

PC Parts are Headed in the Wrong Direction

Fig. 1: Our prediction of the only graphics card nVidia will release in the year 2026 (projected MSRP: $20,000)

Greetings. This article was painful to write. Every section hurt, and every section gets progressively more painful. But the truth can hurt, so read on.

The consumer PC world is headed down a bad path:

There is a major focus by PC part manufacturers to produce extremely expensive and overpowered products, with the mid-tiers and the low-end being neglected. There might be no annihilation and havoc in the personal computer sector immediately, but most consumers are unhappy. If things continue as they are, normal PC buyers may choose to opt out, shrinking the market significantly. With fewer and fewer customers in the long-term, some component manufacturers may find themselves facing their own end-of-life.

Come walk with me, friendly reader, down memory lane, and I will show you how we ended up here… and where we might be going next.

The ‘Fair Winds Have Come’ Pre-Update

(Sailboat photo by Robbie Sproule)

Can you feel it? The change for PC builders, not very subtle, happening even as I type these words?

The clouds have lifted. The sun is shining. The news is good. It is as follows:

The Happy Days GPU Update

At last! All modern GPUs are available for purchase, new, for MSRP. No more crying as you pay 2x or 3x the recommended price for a card. No more heartbreak as you buy a used card that has been sitting in a crypto farm for 2 years. No more sad checking on crypto prices, hoping and praying for a crash. No, friends, that time is over!

Oh, how sweet it is, to have everything in-stock and for a normal price. With that, a large number of changes have hit the charts, so let us take a look.

The (GPU) Spring after a Desolate Winter

After a full eternity of waiting (two years), GPU prices have returned to something that closely resembles sanity.

In-stock, decently priced, current-generation graphics cards are once again linked in almost every tier of our PC building chart!

The “GPU Prices are Not Improving Fast Enough” Update

GPU prices started going up (roughly) in March of 2020 when all hardware went up in price or went out-of-stock. It happened slowly at first, then faster and faster, until widespread unavailability became the norm!

During the worst of the worst, it was so bad that you could not buy most graphics cards, no matter what price you were willing to pay! I am very glad that the worst is over.

But we aren’t out of the woods just yet.

Previous-gen Graphics Card Showdown: RX 5500 XT vs. GTX 1650 Super

Things are not looking ideal for anyone planning to build a PC. The world is in a global pandemic, and supply deficiencies are mixed with high demand. One of the categories that is affected the most is the GPU market: even the cheapest graphics cards from the latest generation are inflated in price to over 500 bucks, across both AMD and Nvidia options.

Because of this, many people are buying graphics cards from the previous generation: Those cards offer a good bang for the buck, and excellent performance. With a budget of 200 bucks, you can get a pretty solid card. Both AMD and Nvidia offer good options, in the form of the RX 5500 XT (4 GB) and the GTX 1650 Super, respectively. Today we are opposing these two cards against each other. Which one should you pick?

GPU Pricing Insanity: What Will Logical Increments Do?

After some very brief relief around the 2017 holidays, graphics card prices continue on the path of going absolutely insane.

We had a cryptocoin-induced inflation back in late 2013, but it was somewhat mild, and only lasted a couple of months. We had a second inflation in 2017, where the price hikes were higher, and lasted more than half a year. When this ended in December 2017, I thought: “Thank goodness that is over. Nothing could have been as bad as that!”

I was so naive, so wrong.

In short, there is not much we can do about graphics cards prices other than continue to recommend the best graphics cards at each price point. However, we want to be realistic about how bad the situation has gotten.

Cryptocurrency and Graphics Cards: GPU Prices Returning to Normal

After months of dealing with graphics card shortages and price spikes due to unsustainable demand from cryptocurrency miners, some very welcome headlines have recently come our way:

Posts Tagged Under: GPU Pricing