The Time to Buy a Graphics Card: A Cautionary Tale

All right, all right, we know you've been waiting for this moment for what feels like an eternity – the time to buy that elusive graphics card. We've been hearing whispers of a potential price drop, and some of you have been mining crypto with your newfound wealth, but before you rush out to make a purchase, my friends, I urge you to hold on just a bit longer.

Now is not the best time to buy a graphics card, despite what the market may suggest. In fact, buying now would be better than waiting, and we have data to back it up. Our 64 graphics card analysis has been running for the past year or two, taking incremental snapshots every three or four months, gauging prices for various SKUs on eBay. This research has given us valuable insights into where prices are headed in the future.

At the same time, we've noticed that there's a lot to dive into when it comes to graphics card prices. With the rapid pace of technological advancements, manufacturers can be slow to release new products, leading to a mismatch between supply and demand. Additionally, the market for pre-owned or refurbished cards is becoming increasingly popular, which can affect pricing.

To help you get started on your graphics card journey without breaking the bank, we've put together some tips and tricks. First up, have you ever wanted to eliminate that annoying Windows activation watermark? Well, now's your chance! Head over to VIP-Scdkey, where you can purchase a Windows 10 Pro OEM key for a fraction of the retail price. Just use a secure payment method like PayPal, enter your product key into your PC settings window, and say goodbye to those pesky watermarks. And don't forget to use our offer code SKGS for an added discount.

We've also noticed that some viewers are eager to get their hands on new information about graphics card prices. Unlike our usual approach of filming a few weeks in advance, we're going live with this video just a few days before it goes online. This means the data you'll see is labeled as July, but we don't expect prices to change within a week. We want to give you the most relevant information possible, so thank you for clicking early on these videos – your help means a lot to us.

Before we get started with the analysis, let's take a moment to appreciate the complexity of the graphics card market. From NVIDIA GeForce to AMD Radeon, each brand offers a range of options that cater to different needs and budgets. Whether you're a gamer, a content creator, or just someone looking for a reliable workstation, there's a graphics card out there for you.

As we dive into the analysis, keep in mind that prices can vary depending on factors like region, retailer, and availability. Our data is sourced from eBay, where you can often find deals on pre-owned or refurbished cards. However, be sure to check the seller's ratings and reviews before making a purchase.

In our next section, we'll explore some of the key findings from our 64 graphics card analysis. From price trends to market saturation, we've got it all covered.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enAll right, all right,(Calm down Matthew McConaughey...)I know you've been wanting to knowif now is finally the timeto buy a freaking graphics card.We've been waiting for so dang longto finally say, YES! now's the time.But, my friends, hold your horses.I don't think that now is the best time.You'd obviously be better off buying nowthan you were a year or two ago,(Greg are you mining crypto with all of THEM!?)and I have a lot of proofto back up why you should still wait,including our 64 graphics card analysisthat we've been running for the past year or two now.We've just been taking incrementsevery three or four months,looking at eBay prices for a plethora of SKUs out there,and kind of just trying to gauge or projectwhere we see prices headed in the future.There's a lot to dive into here.I hope you enjoy it.Stay with me.To get rid of that annoying Windows activation watermark,head on over to VIP-Scdkeyto purchase a Windows 10 Pro OEM keyfor a fraction of the price of retail.Just use a secure payment method like PayPal,enter your product key into your PC settings window,and say bye-bye to the watermark.And be sure to use our offer code SKGS for a sweet discount.Now, unlike what we usually do on the channelwhere we film a few weeks in advance, let's say,and then by the time the video comes out,maybe there's just new infoor the prices have changed or what have you,I want this video to be as relevant as possible.So we're only filming it a few days before it goes live.And so this is late June here.The data you're gonna see is labeled July,but I don't expect prices are gonna change within a week,at least not to the extent that they have in the past month.But I just want it to be relevantfor those who are clicking early on in these videos.And that's a huge help to us.So thank you for that,for clicking as quickly as some of you dowhen you see a video hit your inboxand you're just like, \"Yeah, I gotta watch it.\"Thank you for that.That's pretty awesome support.And hopefully these videos are not only entertainingbut also informative to an extent,this one, I expect,will be more informative than entertaining,although you might find the factthat miners are dumping their cardsout of just sheer panic entertaining.I happen to think so.Anyway, it is excitingto see prices finally look somewhat reasonable again.My benchmark graphics card for the longest timehas been the GTX 1070.Not a new 1070 at MSRP,which was right around $400 or so.A used 1070 two years ago,or pre-mining craze 2.0,was about 200 bucks,and that was a pretty sweet card for the money,at least until the 1660 SUPER came out,and I think that bumped that card downto about 150 or so in the used markets.Well, now we're starting to see them sell for just that,around 150 bucks or so.Some creep up near $200.I think the sweet spot's around 150.But if you're in the market for a cardthat, you know, is just a tried and trueeight-gig framebuffer,it just works,it's not gonna give youlike the craziest 4K performance out there,but it's a solid 1080p and maybe mid 1440p performer,I think this is one to considerat a budget price point of $150.It's a pretty darn good card.It's also a very efficientthanks to the Pascal architecture.Newer cards like the RTX 3060 Tiare also pretty decent deals right now.MSRP is around 400 bucks for this.So, again, similar class to the 1070 when it came out.You can see some of these are selling for at MSRPor even slightly below that.In this case here, $370 bid up there.Now, it's selling from Hong Kong.I wouldn't really call this the,yeah, this isn't really representative of everything.Most of them are selling for about 450 or so.But still, it's not bad.I mean, considering we were paying $800 or morefor these cards six months ago,you can see just how quickly things have corrected.But it ain't all sunshine and rainbows.Just because these prices look good nowrelative to six months agodoesn't mean that everyone should be buying them in bulk.The key phrase is relative to six months ago, right?What they used to be priced at was just awfuland anyone buying then was desperate.You had to be desperateto buy and pay that much for a card for gaming.Now, if you were mining, you were speculating.That's a different argument.But just for pure entertainment purposes,maybe you make a living gaming, again, separate argument,if you're just gaming, though, just to game,just to have fun,paying 800, $900 for a 3060 Ti when it came out,I mean, you were pretty desperate.You had to be,because that price you knew didn't make senseto the normal consumer.But seeing what we're seeing here,and just looking with RTX 3080s, right?$700, 625 bucks.I mean, these look really goodand you'd obviously see much more value in these cards todaythan you would have then,but that does not meanthat you should automatically buy them.And I'm gonna show you some graphsbased on data we've collected over a year agoand in increments leading up to this pointso that you can see the general trendand maybe this will shed some lightonto why I think buying now is still not the best time.So here we go, a bunch of numbers,and I know this might look daunting on the surfacebut I guarantee you it's gonna be very palatableonce I explain what you're looking at.By the way, if you've seensome of our earlier 64 graphics card analysis videos,this is nothing new to you.You can skip ahead to when we talk about the newer graphs.Basically, in a nutshell,what we've done here is ranked graphics card valuebased on Time Spy mean scores and MSRP.That's what this far left chart does.And it's very easy to understand.So let's consider this RTX 3090 here.Just happens to be up top.It has a score in Time Spy,if you look it up, this score might have changed'cause I gathered this data several months agoand that's why we were sticking with the same cardsthroughout this entire process.You'll notice the 3060 Ti is not in this graphor in this chart.There's a bunch of other cards that aren't herethat were released after this chart started.And I know that these scores typically do change over time.Just more people will run the test.That affects the mean obviously.But these scores have not changed, at least in my database,since gathering these 12-plus months ago.Anyway, 3090 had a mean Time Spy score of 19858and an MSRP of 1,499.Now, to calculate value, it's very simple.It is just a ratio of score and price.That gives us value.That's basically performance per dollar.And that value in this case is 13.25.I have a rank here, so this ranked 27,so kind of in the middle.You'll notice that the newer cards,which are more powerful,tend to score higher than the older SKUs they replacejust because of the nature of tech.Tech improves over time,so you get better value out of that tech.Now obviously MSRP's irrelevantif the card isn't selling for MSRP,and for the longest time, it hasn't been, of course.So what we did over the four or five timeswe've taken results,taken data from eBay,is we have taken the last 10 sales of graphics cardsthat are not broken or sold for parts or whatever,they're legitimate sales that you can find on ebay.comof all these different SKUs,all 64 of them or so,and that new average sale price on eBayis what replaces MSRPand that variableis what changes the inferred value of the card.Now, so what you see in this columnis the same calculation I showed you before,only instead of MSRP, we have ESP or eBay sale price.So over time, as this value changes,or excuse me, I shouldn't say value'cause this is also called value here,but as this ESP changes,the implied value of the card changes.So in March of 2022, the 3060 had a value of 17.05.Well, if we scroll up here to November 2021,the 3060 Ti had a value of 13.26.So the value actually went up for this SKUbetween November of last yearand March of this year.And we did this for every single cardat several points throughout 2021 and '22.Okay, I know that that might be a lotand I might not have explained it the best way.We have other explanations of the exact same thingin our previous graphics card analysis videos,which I'll have linked in the video descriptionif you're interested.Anyway, let's get to the graphs'cause that's the juicy stuff.So here we go.This is graphic card scores plotted against value.Scores being the Time Spy scores, the mean.So the further to the right the card is,the higher performing the card.And across all these different scatter plots you'll see,the exposition of the SKU shouldn't changebecause the scores remain the samethroughout all these different points in time.We didn't change the scores as more people entered,submitted their scores on 3DMark's database, et cetera.The value is on the Y axisand this is what will change how high or loweach of these SKUs appears over time.So take for example the Titan V, right?Pretty awful value.Titan cards traditionally are for gaming.So while it does score relatively highcompared to the bulk of cards in this list,it scores rather low on the value side of things,which is why it's closer to, yeah, Y equals zero.A card that is a fairly decent value is the RTX,actually, we do have an RTX 3060 Ti in here.Maybe it's the 3060 that's not hereand the 3050, et cetera.But the 3060 Ti was a really great value card at MSRP.You can see it scores way up here at 30.And it's a decent performing card as well.Eh, kinda like halfway,well, actually, it's a bit above the bulk of the curve,but it's definitely not as powerful as, say, an RTX 3080or definitely a 3090.So we've got MSRP here.Now, we're gonna switch to April 2021, okay?You see that there?How the Y axis is the same,value's up to 30,the score axis, the X axis, is also the same,but all of these cards now are a much lower value,and that's because we took into account eBay sale pricesinstead of MSRP.You can see that our trend line also skews downward,which implies that the better performing cardsare worse values,which is also, it's kind of a weird way to look at it,but if you think about the nature of tech,like we said earlier,the higher performing cardstend to be the newer cards as well,which is why they tend to be better values,and that's why our MSRP chart showsthat, yeah, these higher end SKUsare, yeah, just better value.So they score higher up on the Y axis.But in this case, they don't.And these cards were in hot demand because they were new,there were so few of them,and miners loved them,especially the 3060 Ti, 3070,and there's a lot of older AMD cards and thingsthat were being used for mining as well.Those were massively affected.Now, this is August.Again, same Y axis.You can see a general shift upward.This was a great sign.It showed that cards were becomingslightly better values overall.Then we swap to November 2021and things kind of went down againand I have a feeling this had a lot to dowith the holiday season,folks who were waiting to buy a gaming PCwere just, yeah, they were kind of at the mercyof whatever card was available at any given time.Some of them ended up buying used,secondhand, thirdhand on eBay,and that would at least partially to blame herefor why these cards went down in value.And then back up to March,this is what, the Y axis is a little different here.So March is good again.So we still have that slightly negative trend linebut you can see that cards are much better values.Looking pretty sweet, at least compared to November.I'm double skippingbecause there's a graph in the middle herethat is pretty important.Anyway, this is the exact same chart.I just have scaled the Y axis a tadand the reason I've done thatis because, well, I needed to bump the Y axis up a lotbecause cards are now, in July, roughly, 2022,much, much better values.Look at how much higher these cards are scoring.In fact, remember, our previous graphs cut off here at 30.And again, that didn't fit.Like all these cards,they were much higher scores than that,much higher values,and it's because eBay sale prices in general plummeted.And as the denominator in any ratio decreases,the result, the quotient, increases,that being value.These cards are much better values today,and that is pretty awesome to see.So, again, we go from March 2022, it was okay,it was a trend upward, which was good, to this.That is a huge increase in valuefor almost every SKU we logged with few exceptions.I think the GT 710 you can see down here at the bottom left,that score really didn't changebecause I didn't notice a difference in pricewhen we calculated the mean.We averaged all of these prices to the nearest $50 mark.The GT 710, I think, went down an extra like 20 bucks or so,but it wasn't enough to ultimately change too muchin the way of our scoring here.The Radeon 7, cards that just aren't,like they're pretty scarce, there aren't many of them,and they're just not used for gaming,they're not bought and sold very frequently on eBay,even that card went up in value a pretty decent amount.The Titan cards did as well.I mean, just look at,okay, let's consider a pretty popular card here,the RTX 3080,scoring somewhere around a 15 on the value chart.Check this out.Way up here, a 25 now.Look at the 6800 XT.This card was kind of in the same boat as the 3080for a very long timeand it jumps way up here to a score of 35.That's a really compelling offerfor folks looking for a very powerful card in mid 2022.But there's one other graphthat I think just is the icing on the cakeand this is gonna better explainwhat I'm about to talk about,which is the right time to buy,and that's this chart right here.So this shows the value of certain SKUslisted here at the bottom over time.I've highlighted a few in different colorsjust so you can see how those change.So consider the GTX 980,a very old card, Maxwell architecture.You know, if you're in the marketfor something that's fairly cheapthat still packs a decent punch in 1080p,you might consider this.And you can see the value was kind of just eh.It was always okay.And then check this out.Look, between March and July,how sharp that value increases.That is phenomenal.Another card, a GTX 1080,from November, a pretty awful value,to March, on an upward trend,and that trend continues with almost the same slope in July.Good news.And other newer cards like the RX 5700 XThighlighted in blue,we can see that trendis actually showing an increase in slope over time.Now, this doesn't mean that all of these are gonna continuebecoming better and better values.That would imply that these would,you know, these prices would be approaching $0.Nothing's ever gonna be worth $0.There will be a point at which this levels out.In fact, I imagine it will be somewhat soon,probably around September, October,especially when the holiday season approaches.There will be more pent up demandthat will work its way into eBayand you'll start to see more competitionthat will of course raise pricesor at least offset the sharp decrease in pricesthat we've been seeing for the past few months.So I think the sweet time to buy is not Julybut probably somewhere around August/September timeframe.We also need to consider that new 40-series graphics cardsmay be launching within this timeframe,which should pull demandfrom 30-series and older NVIDIA cardsalong with AMD counterparts.I remember when Ampere was first announced,owners of Turing cards began dumping themfor super low prices.This is something we made a video about.It was such a big dealand the deals were actually super good.I told people to buy thembecause they were never gonna be cheaper than thisfor a very long time.And it turns out Ampere supply was super constrainedright out of the gateand a victim of massive scalping.A similar thing might happen again.So if you can wait, do wait.I don't think you have anything to lose.At this point, prices are changing so quickly,they are dropping so quickly,that it just seems a bit prematureto jump on board and buy something nowwhen the trends suggests that prices will continue to fall.Let's consider the price of Ethereum,which I think is driving a lot of the,a lot of the panic selling right nowthat you're seeing on eBay.A lot of folks mine Ethereumwith graphics cards you're probably gaming with right now.Now, if you bought a new card,of course, that's not possible.But if you bought a used card on eBay,a pretty good chance it was used for mining.Why else would you be selling nowat the worst time in the past two years?Now, you can see these prices around early 2021 shot way upfrom 600 bucks or so to over a thousandin just a, not even a month it looks like here.That price went all the way upto its peak of around $4,600and today it has plummeted down to just over a thousand.In fact, I expect with this trendthat Ethereum will continueto drop below a thousand dollars.I just don't think there's enough support for now.People are too bearishwhen it comes to any sort of investment.There was the idea that cryptocurrencywas going to be that alternate store of wealthwhen people were bearish of the stock marketbut the last year or so has proventhat people are just as speculativeon all these different cryptocurrenciesas they are stocks in the New York Stock Exchange.So unless you were mining around 2019, 2020,and you sold today,I mean, even if you sold at this point,which would, eh, you missed out on a lot of earnings there.If you sold out earlier, you'd have made a ton more money.But you're still making four or five times that.I don't think that minersare gonna be dumping many more cards in the marketthan there are now,so that might be the one reason why you decideto just jump on board nowbecause there might not ever be more supplythan there is currently.But that said, there are a lot of folkswho still think Ethereum is gonna shoot right back up againand maybe even be worth more than it was a year ago.This is all speculation.I don't really like to make videos like thisbecause I just don't follow these markets well enoughto make any claim one way or the other.What I will sayis that there is a very distinct relationshipbetween the price of, say, Ethereumor just cryptocurrencies in generaland the price of graphics cards on the used market.I mean, just look at the 70 series SKU.For example, 3070s are very popular cards.They were at MSRPbut then they very quickly ran out of stock,you couldn't buy them, et cetera.This is an XC3 Ultra from EVGA.This is a killer a IAB for $425, under MSRP,Buy It Now.This wasn't even a bid up card.This was something you could immediately pay 425 bucks forwith free shippingand have it show up at your doorstep.This is an awesome deal.If I had seen this when I was shopping,I would've bought one.And at this price point,it really can't be beat in this market.That said, however, there are many listingsthat sold for prices I would not payand this is why I've been telling folks in generalthat they should wait a bit longer.The fact that there are still 3070s sellingin the mid to high fivessuggests that prices have a solid ways to go.I mean, look, this person here paidtwo times what he should have for a 3070because it was a white version of an ASUS Strix card.It is what it is.This one here for 450, very similar.This one here bid up to 450, not bad.434 here, 450.This one sold for 510.Someone overpaid for that, I think.This one shipped and sold from the United Kingdom, $552.The UK's different.International markets I can't really speak forbecause currencies and availabilityare very different over there.This one, a 3070 SUPRIM, 540 bucks.Not worth it.It's a great SKU, but not worth it in my opinion.Let's see, we've got a few others here.550 bucks for a Founders Edition model.Founders Edition cards are pretty sweet.NVIDIA did a great job with this one.I don't like the proprietary connector,but apart from that, it's a solid SKU.But 550 bucks?Again, some of these prices have a decent ways to go.That's why I don't think that now's the best time to buy.If you find one for mid to low fours,a 37 we're talking about here,jump on board.I don't think you have much to lose there.But the market as a whole hasn't fully rebounded yetand so you have to be careful.In general, I would say no,just give it a give it another month or two.But that doesn't mean that it's not worth lookingbecause if you do find that one listingthat has a Buy It Now price of $400 for a 3070and it's a decent, reliable SKU,it's gonna be pretty difficult to say no to that,especially if you've been waitingseveral months or years evento buy a card like this.Now, back to this chart quickly,some of the best value cards relative to each otherat this point in time,this isn't just saying that like, for example, the 5600 XT,a value of 37,oh, this must be an awesome card.Well, okay, it scored 7591.A 6800 XT scored more than double that.Yet, the 5600 XT is the slightly better valuebecause it has to take into account ESP right?So that's all this is here.This conditional formatting just shows youwhich cards are the better valuesrelative to the other values in this column.The 570, the RX 570, is a cardwith a pretty sweet value herethat I found at a hundred dollars or so on average.The 5600 XT, of course.The 6800 XT was a very surprising high-performing cardwith a relative value of 35.You can find an RX 6800 XT for around 500 bucks or so.At this point, that's gonna be hard to pass up on.There was, yes, the 1070 here,if you can find a 1070 for 150 bucksand you're in the market for a 1080p performer,a value of 40 is just, that's pretty darn awesome.The 1050s I didn't find were all that compelling.A value of 17, not too good at this point.The 1030, pfft, if you're spending a hundred dollarsfor a 1030when you could be spending a hundred dollars for a 1050,unless you have a power constraintor like a form factor limitation or something,this just doesn't make any sense here.Radeon 7, don't buy this for gaming.Another 39.6 in the value departmentwas, ironically, a 390, R9 390.This was around a hundred bucks or so on average on eBay.Pretty sweet, but it is a power consumer.Just mind the performance as well, what to expect there.There were a few others here.Let's see, we've got the 290, 390X.Actually, this one's not very good.The 980 Ti was pretty good, a value of 38 there.For around 150 bucks, this is a pretty sweet steel.You're gonna get a six-gig framebuffer hereversus the standard four that you might find in the 970in the Maxwell lineup.Let's see, there was one other one.Yes, a GTX 980 with a value of 43.This is one of the highest value cards that I found to date,and if you can find it for around a hundred bucks,and again, manage your expectationswith the performance of this card,it's a pretty phenomenal value.Now, that said, the worst value card in this listcontinues to be the GT 710with a score of 192 in Time Spy,which is like barely any score at all.You can still find these cardsfor like 30, 40, 50 bucks online.I have no idea why peopleare buying these cards for these prices.A value of 3.84 is just abysmal.But, yeah, I mean, look at these 980s, right?Four-gig cards.130 bucks for this one,a hundred dollars for this one.Do account for shipping as well.A hundred bucks for this card, a hundred dollars.These are very consistently foundfor anywhere between a hundred and 120 bucksat this point in 2022.And if you want just a solid 1080p gamer,gonna be a bit more,a bit more liberal on the power consumption,but other than that, a fine card, a fine older card,this is a pretty sweet value.Just wanted to show you.I'm not making these numbers up.You can find these being sold all the time on eBayfor around a hundred, 120 bucks now.Look at this one, $75.That's insane.So hopefully this video has shed a bit of lightinto the current state of the graphics card market.Hopefully you understand nowwhy I'm suggesting you do wait a bit longer as well.I'm not saying you shouldn't look,because you might find that one unicorn listingthat is definitely worth pulling the trigger on.But as a whole, some of the newer SKUs especiallyhaven't really hit their bottomand we can see thatbecause some listings are just significantly lower,selling for significantly less money than others,comparable SKUs even,whether it be a low hash rate card or not.The fact is most folks buying cards todayare doing so for gaming on eBay.I'd be willing to put up money on that.If you're buying a card for mining at this point,with the price of Ethereumand every other cryptocurrency it seemsjust plummeting in value,I mean, that's some pretty heavy speculation.You might end up with 10, 20 cards you don't really needand by the time you wanna turn around and resell those,they might be worth even less than you paid now.So maybe you decide to mine with them,but I'd wager most folks buying on eBay todayare buying to game with themand we're just not there yet.We're in the, you know, in the maturing phase.But I think the next month to two monthswill be the sweet spot to buy a cardfor a price that we haven't really seenin a really good while.What, two years it seems?That's a long time to have to go without a graphics card.Just be patient.Be diligent, do your due diligence,and make sure that what you end up buying is as described,because if it's not, get your money back,or at least try to.eBay's pretty good about it.I know folks who are just like,\"Oh, I don't wanna spend money on eBay.I don't wanna take the chance.\"The eBay buyer protection Guarantee's pretty good.I've had more than one or two issueswith things I've bought onlineand eBay almost always gives me my money backbefore I even have to send the card back to the owneror whatever I'm buying.Most cards that I've bought, graphics cards, have worked,and I think, I mean, the sellers know this right?If you're consistently selling thingsthat are not as advertised,if they're broken but you say they're not,eBay's, first off, gonna flag the account.You'll have to restart the whole review process,you'll have to earn your rep again.It's a hassle.So I think eBay does a decent jobholding sellers accountable.That's not to say there aren't bad apples out there.But I think in general, you shouldn't be afraidto try your luck on a used card.Whether or not it was mined with,that's a separate story.We have a video talking about whether or notyou should consider buying a used mined with graphics card.But again, we're getting there.We're in the ripening stage.Check out, especially during August, September,I'm sure we'll follow up with other videosaround those times as wellabout deals we find on eBay,but those are gonna be your sweet spot times I think,unless something radical happens the next month or two,which at this point,just given recent historical precedent,it could happen.I wouldn't put it past us as a planet,as a species at this point.Thank you so much for watching this far into the video.If you enjoyed it, let me knowby giving this one a thumbs-up.Consider subscribing, leave a comment down below,and I will catch you in the next one.My name is Greg.Thanks so much for learning with me.\n"