Last week an Asus Technical Product Marketing Manager, Juan Jose Guerrero III, took to the Asus PC DIY Facebook members group to warn users of impending price increases. A range of MSRP bumps was on its way and would definitely visit upon Asus's 'award-winning' graphics cards and motherboards, said Guerrero.
A number of reasons for the pricing upticks were given at the time with the main excuses being increases in the cost of; components, operating costs, and logistical activities, plus a continuation of import tariffs. Asus claimed to have worked hard to keep any price rises modest.
Now The Verge has noticed that the quiet boldness of Asus has perhaps inspired price rises from the likes of EVGA and Zotac. EVGA has been the most upfront about the painful message it must deliver to consumers, with a call-out box atop of its GeForce 30 Series Family graphics cards pages alerting users to the price adjustments (all currently out of stock online).
Like Asus, EVGA claims to have worked hard to reduce the price rises. Price rises took effect on Monday past but EVGA notes that those already in the various ordering queues will be protected from price rises up until the 16th April – that is as long as your order is processed before that date…
Zotac hasn't been as transparent about its graphics card price rises, notes the Verge which leveraged the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to see that the Hong Kong based Nvidia partner has upped prices twice in recent weeks. Moreover, its price rises are somewhat steeper than EVGA's with even the cheapest TX 30 cards pushed up by between US$90 and $100. For examples an RTX 3060 Ti model has gone from $440 to $500 to $530. At the other end of the spectrum a Zotac RTX 3090 that was $1,550 is now $1,990.
Is it only the USA affected?
I was interested to see if the significant price increases were at least partly down to the renewed Trump import tax on graphics cards into the USA. Checking out the EVGA EU pages at the time of writing there was no special notice and actually available stock of two GeForce RTX 3090 models, the 24G-P5-3971-KR and 24G-P5-3973-KR, at €1,333 and €1,350, respectively. According to Wayback Machine, these are the same prices as listed by EVGA on 24th November 2020. These EU prices need VAT adding at checkout.
