[SOLVED] Why are Component Prices so High?

box o rocks

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Is it the trade war with China? Something to do with COVID?

I was checking prices of some of the items I bought in the recent past and was shocked to see they are either out of stock or selling at crazy high prices. Three Examples:
I bought a RX 580 8GB at Amazon back in September for $165. Now it is $500! and only available from a 3rd party.
I bought a RX 5500 XT at Amazon back in August for $200 and now its selling for $340 - $350. Again, 3rd party seller.
I bought a Ryzen 5 3400 back in August for $150, it's now $270.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture. What's going on and when will prices be back to normal?
 
It's mostly just graphics cards being largely out of stock, along with some of AMD's newer CPUs. The high prices are mainly from third-party sellers trying to make a quick buck by jacking up prices on equipment that would be difficult to find otherwise, and buying up supplies to resell wherever they can find them.

Part of this is down to another rise in cryptocurrency mining, though not actually "Bitcoin", since it's been impractical to mine that with CPUs or GPUs for years.

Another part is down to limited production capacity of graphics cards and CPUs utilizing the newer 7nm and 8nm process nodes. AMD, for example, needs to divide their manufacturing capacity at TSMC between their CPUs, GPUs and the millions of console APUs they are obligated to make for Microsoft and Sony's new consoles right now (which are also a bit hard to come by).

And then there's the initial pricing of Nvidia's new cards, which were given really competitive MSRPs to preempt AMD's return to the "enthusiast" GPU market, despite their limited supplies, which in turn caused massive shortages of those cards ever since they launched months back. As a result, the only place to reliably find those new cards readily in stock is from overpriced third-party resellers.

And since AMD and Nvidia are both in the process of moving their production over to a new generation of components, the older models are likely not getting manufactured in significant quantities anymore, even at price points where they haven't released new models yet.

As for when it will get better, I suspect we might see AMD's CPU pricing and availability improve after Intel releases Rocket Lake within the next couple months or so. Right now, AMD's 5000-series CPUs are outperforming Intel's top models, putting them in high demand that AMD can't keep up with, due to them having significantly lower manufacturing capacity than Intel. If Intel manages to edge out AMD in performance, that should ease demand for those parts, and we will likely see more value-oriented 5000-series models released shortly thereafter.

Graphics cards might take longer to recover though, if prior GPU shortages are anything to go by. It might potentially be late in the year before we see cards back near their MSRPs.
 

Karadjgne

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Scalpers buying up all stock with purchase bots and then reselling them on sites at 50-100% mark up.
Much of that could be solved if places like newegg and Amazon etc gave a hoot about the consumer and not about the buyer. It would be simple to add a 1 unit per address block instead of a 5 unit per buy block. Doesn't help the average Joe one iota when scalpers are hitting 5, using wife's name for 5 more, the kid, a buddy, grandma etc and walking away with 25 or more units on pre-sales.

Purchase Bot all you want to, but finding 25 or more different mailing addresses (they don't accept P.O.Box) gets kinda difficult.
 

USAFRet

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Much of that could be solved if places like newegg and Amazon etc gave a hoot about the consumer and not about the buyer. It would be simple to add a 1 unit per address block instead of a 5 unit per buy block.
Scenario A - Newegg sells 5 GPUs to 5 individual people
Scenario B - Newegg sells 5 GPUs to 1 person (lets call him Scalper).

How many GPUs has Newegg sold?

"care about the individual customer"? Not so much. They know they have a captive audience.
All the ill will in the world will not change the end result of gamers eventually buying that same device anyway.
 

box o rocks

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Sadly, you guys have reinforced my fears. Makes me mad that I just sold a whole computer for what turned out to be the cost of the graphics card alone. :mad:

Edit: Now, this is getting ridiculous! Seriously? A RX 560? That's got to be more than just scalping, no?
 
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Karadjgne

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How many GPUs has Newegg sold?
That's exactly my point. Those retailers aren't going to loose any business selling the gpus, but if you limit to 1 per address, you'll get the traffic. They could even bump the price up a few $ and still get the traffic. If Amazon was the only game in town where you could buy a gpu for anything close to msrp, everybody and their cousin would be logging into Amazon. All it takes is 1 retailer with stock availability at reasonable prices and scalpers are done, nobody but the truly desperate-gotta habit it now-and I don't care about cost would buy from them.

It's the total lack of stock available to the general public that's keeping scalpers in business.
 

USAFRet

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That's exactly my point. Those retailers aren't going to loose any business selling the gpus, but if you limit to 1 per address, you'll get the traffic. They could even bump the price up a few $ and still get the traffic. If Amazon was the only game in town where you could buy a gpu for anything close to msrp, everybody and their cousin would be logging into Amazon. All it takes is 1 retailer with stock availability at reasonable prices and scalpers are done, nobody but the truly desperate-gotta habit it now-and I don't care about cost would buy from them.

It's the total lack of stock available to the general public that's keeping scalpers in business.
Dollars to donuts all that has gone round and round between the Sales, Marketing, Dev teams.

That we've not yet seen such a procedure means...they don't care.
 

g-unit1111

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Dollars to donuts all that has gone round and round between the Sales, Marketing, Dev teams.

That we've not yet seen such a procedure means...they don't care.

Well... Newegg has measures but they're not exactly what I would call "good". Sure you can get a 3080 or a 6800XT but then you have to buy stuff you don't need on top of that. I want a 3080 but what am I going to do with a Z490 motherboard or 16GB of RAM or a PSU? It's just dumb.
 

DSzymborski

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Well... Newegg has measures but they're not exactly what I would call "good". Sure you can get a 3080 or a 6800XT but then you have to buy stuff you don't need on top of that. I want a 3080 but what am I going to do with a Z490 motherboard or 16GB of RAM or a PSU? It's just dumb.

I lucked out here! I had to get the combo with a Gigabyte PSU that isn't very good and I did not want. But it actually put them out of stock for the PSU, so the cart automatically removed the PSU from my order. The only time something being out of stock has ever worked in my favor.
 

g-unit1111

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I lucked out here! I had to get the combo with a Gigabyte PSU that isn't very good and I did not want. But it actually put them out of stock for the PSU, so the cart automatically removed the PSU from my order. The only time something being out of stock has ever worked in my favor.

Nice! I'm hoping that I get that sort of thing when I can actually buy my EVGA 3080, whenever that is!
 
Scenario A - Newegg sells 5 GPUs to 5 individual people
Scenario B - Newegg sells 5 GPUs to 1 person (lets call him Scalper).

How many GPUs has Newegg sold?

"care about the individual customer"? Not so much. They know they have a captive audience.
All the ill will in the world will not change the end result of gamers eventually buying that same device anyway.
After checking Newegg daily for several months I finally scored an Asus GTX 1650 Super for $179.99. Considering how things have been going I felt lucky.
 

g-unit1111

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I agree there are numerous factors, scalpers being prime.

Also with the recent Bitcoin surge that's not helping things either.

Kinda like fishing. Put as many poles in the water as you can and hope something bites on one of them.

Yup. I'm hoping to get one from EVGA directly so I don't get any of Newegg's extra parts that they are throwing in. Though my other rig could use a motherboard upgrade I'm not in a hurry to do so.
 

box o rocks

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This does not seem to me to be the time to build a new PC unless you're in the "cost is no issue" crowd. Not even updating one's graphic card or CPU. Archaic65 was lucky to score that GTX 1650S at $180. The cheapest ones now are going for ~$400. And Newegg is completely out of them, 3rd party only.
 
This does not seem to me to be the time to build a new PC unless you're in the "cost is no issue" crowd. Not even updating one's graphic card or CPU. Archaic65 was lucky to score that GTX 1650S at $180. The cheapest ones now are going for ~$400. And Newegg is completely out of them, 3rd party only.
I generally agree, at least on the graphics card side of things. Though those $400 1650 SUPERs and such would be from third-party resellers trying to make a quick buck, while presumably one might be able to find one in stock at a price closer to MSRP from an actual retailer if they spend a lot of time hunting around and get lucky. It's not exactly a buyer's market though.

The CPU side is a lot better, as most processors are readily available near their MSRPs, with the exception of a few pieces of newly-released higher-end hardware. Even that may get better soon though, as lots of people are likely holding off on building systems due to the situation with graphics cards, and Intel shouldn't have much of an issue with production capacity for Rocket Lake seeing as it's still being built on the same 14nm process that they've been using for over the last half-decade. And all other components seem to be relatively reasonably priced. It's just graphics cards, for the most part, though that's enough to make it a really unattractive time to be building a gaming PC.
 

g-unit1111

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This does not seem to me to be the time to build a new PC unless you're in the "cost is no issue" crowd. Not even updating one's graphic card or CPU. Archaic65 was lucky to score that GTX 1650S at $180. The cheapest ones now are going for ~$400. And Newegg is completely out of them, 3rd party only.

Actually right now I would totally agree that it's a terrible time to build. It's mainly due to the unavailability of high end Ryzens and anything in the GPU front. I would like to think that in a couple of months the supply side will start working itself out but that remains to be seen.
 

box o rocks

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I generally agree, at least on the graphics card side of things. Though those $400 1650 SUPERs and such would be from third-party resellers trying to make a quick buck, while presumably one might be able to find one in stock at a price closer to MSRP from an actual retailer if they spend a lot of time hunting around and get lucky. It's not exactly a buyer's market though.

The CPU side is a lot better, as most processors are readily available near their MSRPs, with the exception of a few pieces of newly-released higher-end hardware. Even that may get better soon though, as lots of people are likely holding off on building systems due to the situation with graphics cards, and Intel shouldn't have much of an issue with production capacity for Rocket Lake seeing as it's still being built on the same 14nm process that they've been using for over the last half-decade. And all other components seem to be relatively reasonably priced. It's just graphics cards, for the most part, though that's enough to make it a really unattractive time to be building a gaming PC.
Even the MSRPs are considerably higher than normally expected due to the tariffs (that we end up paying) on everything from China. That is virtually everything in a PC minus possibly the CPU.
Btw, I just read that cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) has fallen. Might take some of the heat off card buying?
 

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