Good news for PC gamers who are eagerly awaiting the chance to upgrade their old video card still plugged into their battle machines. It’s been two incredibly complicated years from this point of view, with closures due to COVID and then the boom in cryptocurrencies: a combo that has brought GPU prices to all-time highs. The situation finally seems to be about to change, however: the easing of restrictions combined with a return to normalcy is improving the situation of the semiconductor crisis that hit us between 2020 and 2021. The offer of GPUs has improved all over the world, shipments are more numerous and more regular. NVIDIA and AMD cards that previously sold for double the manufacturer’s suggested price are slowly falling in price, and perhaps ASUS will give the tail swipe it takes to finally get us past this bad time, at least in the US.
A representative of ASUSin an email sent to some newspapers Americansconfirmed that “Following the removal of Chinese import tariffs enacted by the USTR, gamers and PC enthusiasts will see lower prices on ASUS GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards starting April 1, 2022“. This price reduction will apply to both low-end, mid-range and high-end video cards. Not all cards will be discounted in the same way: ASUS specifies that they could reach a discount of up to 25%, but not for all models; in others it may be less. However, this only applies to the US market, because it is the only country that, due to the tariffs applied by the Trump administration on Chinese goods, has seen such significant increases in the “base” price. without taking into account any scalpers that they resell at crazy prices.
The motivation for this decision is twofold: on the one hand, the offer is improving with more regular shipments and supplies; on the other hand, the decision of the US parliament to revoke some increased tariffs on imports of certain goods produced in China. Among these revoked tariffs was also the one on printed circuit boards, which caused the price of some PC components to rise from 7% up to 25% in some cases.
In this case, however, the discount is not directed to the final consumer, but is a reduction of “up to 25%” of the MSRP, or the price that ASUS suggests to retailers such as Newegg, Amazon, Best Buy, etc. which in turn should reflect on the price of the product sold on the shelves, obviously adding a surplus to their margins.
We do not know if these price cuts will in any way also affect the prices of video cards here in Europe, although the positive trend seems to be confirmed: some German retailers are currently selling AMD’s low-end GPUs even at a price. lower than suggested by the Taiwanese company. At the moment, in Europe, the average prices of video cards are “only” 25% higher than their fair market price set by the manufacturer.
Source: ASUS via PC Gamer
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