Crypto Crash's Silver Lining? Gaming Might Get Cheaper In 2022 As GPU Street Prices Take A Beating

There may be a silver lining hidden in the dark cloud that is the recent cryptocurrency crash — prices of gaming hardware made by the likes of NVIDIA Corporation NVDA and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc AMD appears to be finally be heading southwards.

What Happened: The drop in the prices of Bitcoin BTC/USD and Ethereum ETH/USD from 50% of their value in November is leading to an erosion in prices of graphics processing units used in gaming.

Tom’s Hardware compiled one week’s worth of pricing data from late December compared to the past week, which showcased average GPU prices from eBay Inc EBAY. The data tracked prices of the latest graphics cards from both AMD and Nvidia. 

An Nvidia GEForce RTX3080 10 GB, which sold for $1,804.28 on average between December 20 and 27 on eBay, was going for $1,595.41 between January 17 and 24. This is a drop of 11.6%.

AMD’s Radeon RX6600 also saw an 11.6% price drop in the same period. The GPU’s price slipped from $586.89 to $518.66.

The RX 6600 competes with Nvidia’s RTX 3060 12 GB GPU in terms of 1080p gaming performance and is merely 4% slower (in non-ray tracing games), according to Tom’s Hardware.

The RTX 3060 12 GB costs $705 on eBay, which is significantly higher than the AMD offering, as per the data.

See Also: How To Buy NVIDIA (NVDA) Stock

Why It Matters: On average, nearly every GPU fell 5% in price while the RTX 3090, The RTX 3080 (10 GB), and RX 6600 dropped more than 10%, according to Tom’s Hardware data.

The data indicates that the number of GPUs sold also took a hit. This drop in quantities sold was seen across the board with some exceptions such as the RTX 3090 and the RTX 3070Ti.

Nvidia introduced cryptocurrency mining graphics chips last year. A boom in the demand for GPUs has been noted during previous cryptocurrency bull runs followed by a subsequent slump in demand.

If the decline in cryptocurrencies continues and GPU production rises due to the waning shortage of key component ABF substrate, the prices of GPUs can be expected to continue declining, noted Tom’s hardware.

Meanwhile, AMD’s rival Intel Corporation INTC said last week that it plans to unveil an energy-efficient Bitcoin mining chip.

Price Action: On Monday, Nvidia shares traded mostly unchanged in the regular session at $233.72 and fell 0.8% in after-hours trading to $231.75. On the same day, AMD shares dropped 1.9% to $116.53 in the regular session and fell another 1.7% to $114.60 in after-hours trading.

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