It was only a matter of time before the retailers and manufacturers got together to offer actual graphics card deals. And today there are two RTX 3070 Ti (opens in new tab) pixel pushers on offer at Newegg with a $100 discount.
With GPU stock increasing we've moved past the point where it didn't matter how much you charged for a card, it would still get snapped up by an enthusiastic gamer. Or reseller looking to charge even more on ebay. Manufacturers and retailers are now having to compete for our money in a way they haven't for the longest time, and so prices are coming down and discounts are actually starting to happen.
Case in point, a pair of overclocked RTX 3070 Ti cards from MSI and Gigabyte. The Gigabyte Gaming OC RTX 3070 Ti for $750 (opens in new tab) is a marginally better buy by my reckoning. It's got a slightly higher overclock and a moderately lower profile by the looks of things. But the MSI Ventus RTX 3070 Ti similarly at $750 is still ever-so-slightly overclocked beyond the stock 1,770 MHz boost clock.
(opens in new tab)
(opens in new tab)Our review of the RTX 3070 Ti in Founders Edition trim, found it to be one of the hottest cards around. And not in a good way. The full GA104 GPU it uses has a higher core count than the RTX 3070 below it, and that makes it a toasty chip, coupled with the fact it was labouring under the same cooler as the slower RTX 3070 Founders Edition, and it was actually getting thermally limited in use.
With these two Gigabyte and MSI GPUs, however, you're getting their own triple-fan designs which ought to be able to manage the heat generated by this powerful slice of graphics silicon and keep it quiet while gaming.
The RTX 3070 Ti is effectively the card launched to make sure Nvidia had a healthy lead over the Radeon RX 6800 (opens in new tab), which puts it between that and the Radeon RX 6800 XT (opens in new tab) in terms of gaming performance. While we're talking about the outstanding AMD card, there is a Sapphire Pulse RX 6800XT (opens in new tab) on offer for $840 right now, too.
(opens in new tab)It is worth noting that, while the two Nvidia graphics cards are ostensibly discounted, they are both well above the original MSRP for the stock RTX 3070 Ti. When it was launched Nvidia was calling it a $599 card, and these two SKUs from Gigabyte and MSI represent their more affordable lines.
So, we're not down to MSRP just yet, but even in so-called 'normal' times a third-party, overclocked version of any given graphics card could get close to topping $150 over the MSRP anyways. It's a good sign, and not a bad deal, either.
