Gamers prepare your wallets for Black Friday, it may be your last chance to buy a GPU at a good price, suggests PowerColor
We might have the first confirmation of the supposed GPU price hike reported by Chinese Board Channels sources . As a recap, the story was that GPU makers are now expected to increase pricing due to unexpected price increases for memory components. As some of you may already know, NVIDIA and AMD do not sell just GPUs to board partners – they sell a GPU and memory bundle, which makes the purchase easier for AIBs but also means they cannot source the memory on their own unless they have special deals.
This means that when AMD and NVIDIA give a quote, it also includes memory for the GPU, and graphics memory is now seeing up to a 30% price increase, quickly following DDR5 memory pricing, which is even higher.
Apparently this is true, because a PowerColor representative on Reddit, commenting on our story and later posting his own thread, gave a heads up to potential GPU buyers. It looks like PowerColor (or perhaps also AMD) is planning some kind of discounts for next week, which may be your last chance to secure a new GPU at a reasonable price. PR rep Steven also mentions that gamers should buy new cards before the last week of the year , because prices will go up.
Source: Reddit
Perhaps this is just PowerColor price planning, but we all know TUL Corporation / PowerColor is one of the key AMD partners for Radeon series, so it is not something they would share easily.
Usually, when prices fluctuate within a few percent, GPU makers rarely make any public announcements about price changes. There is a chance this will be quickly adjusted and will either be absorbed by retailers or pricing will go back.
Source: PowerColor/Reddit
