[Hardware] GPU Pricing Index: Tracking eBay Sadness

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GPU Pricing Index: Tracking eBay Sadness

 

Our GPU pricing index tracks all the best graphics cards and pretty much everything else in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. This past week saw the launch of AMD's latest Radeon RX 6700 XT, which quickly joined the ranks of the "Sorry, you can't buy it!" list of GPUs. You could pay extreme pricing on eBay, but we don't recommend that. Ethereum mining continues to be a major factor in eBay GPU prices, and the past week showed continued volatility, with most GPUs continuing to sell for at least double their official MSRPs.

Our charts and data come via code originally developed by Michael Driscoll, which we've modified for our purposes. Mostly, we've adjusted the search parameters and tweaked the look of the charts. We're looking at the past week of sales, but we also have a longer look at pricing history on the next page.

We update this article on a weekly basis with the latest pricing trends, and will continue to do so as long as it makes sense. We've included all major GPUs of the past several generations and ran queries against eBay's sold auctions, filtering for junk data. While we do our best to exclude listings where it's an image of a card, or just the box, some of those may slip through, but we're mostly interested in the overall trends.

As with last week, the overall trend on GPU prices from eBay remains mostly flat, though with a continued upward trend on the newest cards. AMD's RX 6700 XT debuted with prices ranging from $800 up to over twice that, for example.

Here are the charts for Mar 4–11, 2021. We've gathered data on 62 different GPUs, which we'll organize into groups based on the GPU generations.

Ampere and RDNA2 Graphics Cards
The latest generation graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia see the most demand, and every Ampere and RDNA2 card saw slightly higher prices during the past week. That's likely thanks to Bitcoin reaching a new all-time high of over $61,000 on March 13, and while prices dropped a bit after that spike, it's still up 3% over the past week. Ethereum saw a similar jump in price, but it wasn't able to eclipse it's previous high of $2,030, peaking at around $1,930.

In total, nearly 2,000 Nvidia Ampere graphics cards traded hands on eBay last week (1,984 by our count). That's a bit less than the previous week (2,085), though the time of day when we collect the data likely accounts for some of that. AMD's numbers are quite a bit lower, with 260 RDNA2 cards sold in total. That's up from the 188 sold the previous week, and the 13 RX 6700 XT units only had a small impact. We'll have to see if the 6700 XT picks up next week, though at these prices it's hard to imagine there are many buyers.

Of course, we're only able to pull data from eBay's public listings. While we suspect the relative proportion of AMD to Nvidia sales at retail is similar, there's certainly a wider margin of error. With ever major site still showing every recent GPU as out of stock or backordered, though, every GPU produced continues to get snapped up by a voracious market.