I am getting to the point of a new PC build. I figured holiday sales and the upcoming release of Nvidia’s new line of GPUs (the 50xx series expected in March) would mean their 40xx series would be going down in price.
Nope. Quite the opposite and to an amazing degree. A quick peek at Newegg has the top line 4090 card going from $2600 to close to $4000 per card! Heck, a refurbished one is $2500.
That is madness! WTF is going on here?
This is an end-of-life product and I’d think most who wanted one has one. Sure there will be some who need a new one or are upgrading but there was a time these were flying off the shelf and got very expensive. But not this expensive.
I thought bitcoin changed the algorithm so consumer level graphic cards were no longer able to do the job. Also, a consumer grade card is really not sufficient to do crypto mining or AI at home. You could dabble but you will be blown out of the water by companies running thousands of these.
And, if you are a company running thousands you are not going to Newegg or Best Buy. You call Nvidia and order a few thousand.
Plus, this increase is very recent. They were never cheap cards but this price spike is new. People have been doing crypto and AI long before this.
ETA: Here is the price history of one 4090 sold on Amazon. See the spike?
Mrs. Odesio and I figured we’d soon be in the market for computers to replace our aging systems. She got a laptop and I got a new desktop for Christmas because we were afraid prices would go up quite a bit when the Trump administration takes power. I ended up getting an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super which constitutes about 1/3rd the overall price of my computer. I went ahead and splurged hoping the computer lasts a long, long time.
Which would not necessarily stop individual consumers from wanting to buy now anyway, in fear of future tariffs (as evidenced by @Odesio 's post), and thus driving up prices, particularly if retailers or wholesalers are taking advantage of high demand and pricing accordingly.
It’s not like there’s a law that says the price of a card can’t exceed cost +X. Jacking the price up in response to increased demand from people that want to buy before tariffs is something that could happen. (Not saying that’s the explanation here.)
As someone that works in AI, you absolutely can do AI on a 4090. You couldn’t train GPT4 from scratch, but you can do research on a significant subset of the field.
I’d be willing to bet the people capable and willing to do that kind of research are not enough people to put a dent in the consumer grade GPU market (at home…if their company buys 10,000 then sure).
But again, I am asking about retail consumer cards. Cards that are almost certainly already in the US and not going to China. You can see the sudden price spike posted earlier in this thread. It is dramatic. Do you think that is China buying them all in the US and shipping back to China (which is probably illegal for US merchants to do)?
I do not think China is buying from Best Buy (maybe they are).
You’re seeing third-party pricing spike because those cards are never in stock elsewhere because production is shifting to the 5000 series and people are rushing to buy before tariffs hit, the 5000-series price bump hits, and they now have their holiday bonus. (and third-parties are jerks like that.)
The 4090 is dumb expensive in part because Nvidia stopped production of them. Yes, it would make more sense (maybe) to wait for a 5090 but, if you need a card NOW, you’re stuck with the current non-replenished supply. There’s also questions about what the 5090 will cost at launch and how accessible they will be. Can I stroll into a Micro Center in March 2025 and pull one off the shelf or will customers be forced to deal with scalpers and bots and eBay prices of $3000+?
As I understand it, the 4090 is still a desired card for AI purposes, especially in regions where high end GPUs are restricted. The 4090 is restricted as well, but it’s still easier for places to get a 4090 sent in from outside the country than getting their hands on the real high end workstation GPUs. As someone with a 4090 and 64GB DDR5, I can run a 70b LLM reasonably fast (it responds about as quickly as someone typing the reply would) and smaller models quickly enough to be virtually without delay. As noted, it’d not going to rival ChatGPT but it’s certainly competent as a local AI. Stable Diffusion runs quickly as well so it’s a good card for a consumer hobbyist wanting to play with that stuff.
I think the last real GPU fire sale was between the 2000 and 3000 series. Then everyone who dumped their 2080s for peanuts got burned hard when the Great GPU Shortage happened with the launch of the 3000 series cards and a lot of people are gun shy about it since. Plus the older cards are still very capable – I have a 3080 sitting around “just in case” and, if I had to slap it in as a backup, I could still play the games I’m playing now, just with lower – but not silly low – settings.
I currently game on a 2080Ti. The common wisdom at the time was it was a waste of money.
But, it has lasted me about six years so far and frankly holds up pretty well. Technically, it can do ray tracing (I would not recommend it though).
I can play pretty much anything these days except maybe the new Indiana Jones game (it seems to have exceptional requirements). And those games play pretty well. But it is getting a bit long in the tooth as is my whole six year-old system. I’m in no big rush but it’s time for the next upgrade for me I think.
Which is why I was looking and my jaw dropped at the price spike that happened just before I started looking. I still do not get it.
Yeah, even trying to deconstruct the reasons, it’s still a stupid-silly price to be asking for the cards. I bought my card in early summer when they briefly came back in stock on Nvidia’s site for the base $1,499 MSRP. Reddit opinion at the time was that anyone buying them for MSRP was a sucker because 5000 would be out any day now and crash the price of the 4090s. That hasn’t exactly happened.
Which reminds me of something else AI related: the 5090 is rumored to have 32GB memory but the 5080 is only supposed to have 16GB. So the 24GB 4090 still has a place for home enthusiasts in the near term.
I suspect they did that to leave room for a 5080Ti that has 24GB.
We desperately need a competitor against NVidia. Surprisingly, Intel busted out a seemingly excellent budget card at an excellent price a few days ago. AMD has left the market.
Fingers crossed for Intel to keep going with this. Intel has a lot of problems these days but this seems a bright spot.
A year ago or so I bought a 4090 on Amazon for $1800. Turned out to be a scam…never delivered. I had to go five rounds with Amazon to get a refund. They never said no but were not keen on the refund either but it was obvious I was ripped off by someone on their site and they made good in the end. Still sucked.
