The graphics card shortage continues despite dips in Bitcoin and Ethereum pricing

Right now, looking for a great graphics card at a decent price can be a real pain. Why? Given that both AMD and Nvidia have teamed up with OEMs to produce graphics cards dedicated to cryptocurrency mining, it’s easy to point fingers at these digital miners for the graphics card shortage. And while that’s entirely possible, it’s not the full story. So we dug into Amazon supplies for a window into the shortage.

Disclaimer: Not every aspect of the graphics card shortage is attributable to physical supply. Many cards just aren’t sold through Amazon. For instance, EVGA’s portfolio of 70 GeForce GTX 10 series cards is reduced to 53 separate models served up through the popular online retail outlet. Out of the reduced batch, Amazon itself had only 15 cards in stock, with the remaining 38 models sold through its third-party sellers during our investigation.

That said, if Amazon has a graphics card in stock, it will normally sell the unit at the manufacturer’s suggested price. In our investigation of the graphics card shortage, there were rare instances where Amazon actually sold cards at slightly increased prices. There were also many units that actually had a reasonable discount. Another tactic we saw was that Amazon would increase the manufacturer’s price by $30 or so, then mark it back down to the normal price at a “reduced rate” exclusively for Prime Members.

Thus, Amazon customers looking for a good price on the best graphics card have to grab one while they’re still sold directly by the retailer. Otherwise, it’s a pricing free-for-all with its third-party sellers. Prices can inflate by more than 100 percent, and that can be costly the higher up customers go on the graphics performance totem pole. The biggest mark-ups are tacking hundreds of dollars to video card prices.

What’s in stock? Not much

To get a better visual idea of the graphics card shortage, take a look at these tables:

As the numbers show, the Radeon RX 500 and Buy at Amazon cards manufactured by Asus and listed on Amazon are currently mostly sold through third-party sellers. In fact, Amazon’s stock of RX 500 Series cards is extremely low, thus customers are forced to purchase these cards at inflated prices through its third-party sellers, or look elsewhere online for (hopefully) a better deal.

However, in our investigation, we noted that Amazon’s stock mostly resided in the cheaper, low-powered card market. Gigabyte’s listed Radeon RX 550, GeForce GTX 1050, and GeForce GTX 1050 cards were plentiful. MSI’s low-end GTX 1050 Ti and GTX 1050 cards were mostly in stock, too, along with solutions from Zotac. Interestingly enough, Amazon had plenty of Zotac GTX 1080 cards in stock as did MSI and EVGA, which are at the other end of the performance spectrum.

Ultimately, the cards mostly hit, it seemed, were the GTX 1070, GTX 1060, RX 580, RX 570, and RX 560.  Their suggested retail prices range from $100 to $400, making them great upgrades for the money when they’re actually sold by Amazon. However, the GTX 1070 cards manufactured by Gigabyte and sold through Amazon’s third-party sellers, for example, were jacked up in price between 33 percent and 82 percent, such as the G1 Gaming 8G selling for $780 (typically $430).

Here are the prices of baseline graphics cards listed on Amazon, which we will refresh each week. Right now, certain OEMs don’t even have listings for a specific GPU on Amazon, but we’ll leave space for them anyway in case a product does show up.

AMD video card prices

Nvidia video card prices

Is there an end in sight?

Not yet.

The graphics card shortage stems from the cryptocurrency mining crowd, which appears to be consuming GTX 1070 and GTX 1060 cards along with AMD’s batch of Radeon RX 500 Series cards. These cards offer a lot of bang for the buck, and cryptocurrency miners understandably want the best value, because it improves the efficiency of mining coin for profit.

We’ve started to see companies offer graphics cards for mining digital currency. These typically have less impressive coolers than gaming cards, and often don’t have video output ports, because they’re not needed for mining. However, these cards remain rare, so a lot of demand is still focused on gaming cards.

A recent downturn in the price of Ethereum, an upstart currency that gained popularity over the last six months, has brought some hope that demand will decrease. However, Bitcoin remains strong. It does appear that video card prices are slightly offer the peaks — but cards are still hard to obtain at MSRP, and there’s no immediate reason to expect relief.

Updated on July 26, 2017, by Kevin Parrish to reflect current prices.