We're always on the hunt for great deals here—the sort of thing that will actually save our dear readers some money on the PC gaming hardware they really want. That means we've not been able to write about any graphics card deals in what feels like forever. At least not for two years for a half-decent deal, anyways.
But today the graphics card crisis appears to be easing. Not all that rapidly, but gently GPU prices are coming back down to their MSRPs. That's generally promising news for PC gamers because, while we're not out of the woods yet, it does mean GPUs, such as this Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Gaming OC are available in stock for $1,530.
This is a card that was at one point listed on Amazon US for $2,999. I'm not sure if anyone paid that much for one, or that anyone even thought about it, but the market was so barren for capable GPUs that there is a chance someone did. Those were some truly dark times for PC gaming.
We know people have been paying more than $1,530 for this card even fairly recently, though. This same model is going for $1,840 on Amazon and is listed as a "#1 best seller". Just head over to B&H and it's 17% cheaper.
Now is that a good deal for Nvidia's GA102-225 GPU and 12GB of GDDR6X memory? I guess it is, kind of. It's relatively a great deal compare to what we would have seen this card go for in 2021, but it's still a little more than we'd really like to pay judging by its supposed $1,200 MSRP. That's for the Founders Edition though, and you are getting a chunkier triple-fan cooler here for your trouble.
Though if you look at the RTX 3080 Ti's MSRP as a product of the chip crisis, too, and instead compare to the $699 MSRP of the RTX 3080 that came out just prior to everything going badly for PC hardware, it's really not a great deal.
But the same could be said of just about any RTX 3080 Ti, and Nvidia's basically wiped that old MSRP off the face of the planet with the new 12GB RTX 3080 that's easily over $1,000 as standard.
So a mixed bag, but one I thought worth highlighting as it's in stock and ready to go today. If you want to check out the sort of performance you can expect of this card, take a look at my Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition review. Long story short, however, it's an absolute beast. It better be for this sort of money—you could buy a whole PC for that kind of cash.
There's one more thing I wanted to mention: You might find that GPU prices continue to crash throughout this year, and by the time new GPUs arrive towards the tail end of 2022, you could find you're still overpaying with even this half-decent RTX 3080 Ti price. That's a risk you'll have to weigh up yourself, and I'd say comes down to whether you're happy holding out for a little while longer or are fed up and ready to upgrade right away.
A member of the PC Gamer team just decided to heck with it and bought this exact GPU in the UK, though. So you'd be in good company if you decided to go for it and take that risk. You see, we get it, and we won't be the ones to say "I told you so" when prices eventually normalize.
