How to talk about a graphics card deal with a Dud this holiday season

If you are looking for a new graphics card this holiday season, it can be quite difficult to discern an agreement as a failure. The latest Nvidia RTX cards are brand new and often sell beyond the entry-level MSRP. So, do not expect a lot of business – if any – with an RTX 2070, 2080 or 2080 Ti in 2018.

Older and more traditional cards, meanwhile, have finally registered a drop from the highest recorded in a year because of the decline in interest (and falling prices) crypto-currencies. But retailers will often use these previously extreme prices to give the impression of a single-card card when in fact it may sell only at the initial introductory price of 2016.

How, then, do you say if the selling price of a specific card is a good deal or not? A good place to start is to look for the original retail price / MSRP, which you can always find in our graphics card reviews. This will give you at least a baseline and will let you know if the current price is inflated or not. But that does not mean you will still not see many cards nowadays that are selling above their suggested prices for two years.

The next step is to check the card (s) you plan to view on a price tracking site, such as camelcamelcamel. Although this site focuses on Amazon, knowing Amazon's pricing history is also a useful foundation.

If we take the example of an AMD RX 580 Armor 8G OC manufactured by MSI, we can see that the card was briefly available in 2017 for about 230 USD in the first half of 2017, before reaching 466 USD in March of this year, before falling again. below $ 300 in June. And the asking price of $ 225 when we wrote this is the lowest price for which the card was sold – although still not much lower than when it was launched in April 2017.

You can find similar data on Nvidia cards, but you will mostly find information on third-party card prices, because Amazon does not usually sell Founders Edition models (except for third-party sellers who often inflate prices).

With MSRP and a detailed price history, you are a good place to tell if a "selling price" is a legitimate deal or a slight retreat from an inflated price. But what cards / GPUs to us More precisely do you expect to see offers on this holiday season?

As we said earlier, do not expect major (or even minor) price declines on RTX cards at the end of the year. Despite high prices, the stock seems to be light – at least in the 2080s and 2080s. These cards are still very new and the first users seem to buy them about as fast as Nvidia and its partners can dismiss them.

You may see offers on older Nvidia 10 series cards, but it depends on the shelf life of the stock now that the GPU manufacturer is moving to a new architecture. There is a new variant of the GTX 1060 with a faster memory GDDR5X. But again, this card is brand new and so it is unlikely to get a big discount in 2018.

However, if you are looking for a card in the same performance range as the 1060 at a great price, we suggest you keep an eye on the AMD RX 580 cards. The company's recent call for results indicated that the crypto crash had left its partners overcrowded in graphics card inventory. And persistent leaks and rumors indicate that an updated RX 590 card is about to enter the market with better performance to compete with Nvidia's GTX 1060. Retailers may want to get rid of the old RX 580 and perhaps 570 cards. We'll keep an eye on these cards if you're looking for an interesting offer on a traditional model this holiday season.

In this story, we intended to provide a chart containing all current cards, their original default selling price, and a base reference price equal to or less than a given card. But as 2018 ends, it seems that the stock of many cards – even the oldest traditional models – continues to fluctuate wildly. Prices change accordingly, going up even on a given day. That's why all the price suggestions we propose today would be out of date by the time you probably read this story.

Instead, we'll let you see below a list of cards focused on current games and their launching PRSPs. Do not forget that for many cards, even for models marketed for over two years, prices in the real world often remain higher than the prices originally offered.

While the craze for crypto may be over, we probably still feel the effects this holiday season, as card makers juggle with existing stock after a dwindling demand and prepare for new cards to come, all trying to control their profit margins.

We do not usually recommend paying more than the suggested price, especially if you are after an agreement. But even if the current price of a card is still higher than the launch price of the 2016 era, it could still be considered an "agreement". We hate to be a grinch of the GPU. But it seems that the 2018 holiday season will be disappointing again for those of us who expect time to improve gaming performance at lower prices.

If you still do not know exactly which card you want to buy, or if current prices have thrown a key into your original upgrade plans, check out our buying guide for graphics cards, our page GPU performance hierarchy and Optimal Maps pages for more information. help clarify your options.