How Overheated Is the GPU Market in 2018?

Over the past few months, we’ve talked about the GPU market running hot and the corresponding impact on customers. 

What we haven’t discussed are the specifics of how the cryptocurrency craze is hitting specific GPUs or how the impact varies between AMD and Nvidia. No graphics card (See on Amazon) is a great deal right now, but there’s quite a bit of variance between how bad they are.

There is, however, a substantial caveat to this discussion: GPU prices have been bouncing around since the cryptocurrency market surged and they haven’t exactly settled yet.

The prices in this article are current according to Newegg as of Feb. 27, 2018, but they could be obsolete as early as the next morning. There’s not much we can do about that.

Nvidia’s Pricing

Let’s start with Nvidia. Here’s the current list of Nvidia GPU prices, the current MSRP on GPUs, and the list prices.


The GT 1030 and 1050 are both well above MSRP, but the difference in actual dollars isn’t huge an extra $22 for a GT 1030 and an extra $40 for a 1050.

Neither one of these GPUs is a good deal at this price, but they’re still affordable if you grit your teeth. Above the GTX 1050, things start getting uglier.

The GTX 1060 6GB is worse than the 3GB variant and the GTX 1070 is running at more than double its base MSRP. The 1070 Ti and 1080 don’t jack up the cost curve quite so much, with the GTX 1080 just $8 more than the GTX 1070 Ti.

The GTX 1080 Ti is “only” inflated by 1.3x, though this is enough to peg it to the $900 price point.
There is a bit of a loophole on the GTX 1080. Gigabyte is selling an external enclosure with a GTX 1080 priced at $700.