Galakuro, a graphics cards supplier affiliated with Galax, started to sell its GeForce RTX 3050 GPUs in Japan on Friday. When announcing its entry-level Ampere GPU for desktops, albeit at an already inflated price, Nvidia said that the product wouldn’t bring the latest technologies to budget-conscious customers. Still, Galakuro’s GeForce RTX 3050 is far from being inexpensive.
In the U.S., Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3050 carries an MSRP of $249, which is relatively high for an entry-level product. Unfortunately, we do not know the Japanese MSRP for this graphics card. Galakuro’s GeForce RTX 3050 (GG-RTX3050-E8GB/SF) was available for a whopping ¥50,138 ($439 with taxes, $399 without taxes) at Amazon Japan (opens in new tab), as noticed by @momomo_us (opens in new tab), which is higher than it should be. Yet, the graphics card sold out in hours, even at this price.
Galakuro’s GeForce RTX 3050 is not some fancy graphics card with extremely high clock speeds or an advanced cooling system. Instead, the graphics card is a typical budget graphics card based on the rather expensive GA106-150 GPU with 2,560 enabled CUDA cores and 8GB of GDDR6 memory connected using a 128-bit memory interface cooled with a simplistic single-fan cooling system. Like other desktop GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards, this one has four display outputs: four DisplayPort 1.4 outputs and one HDMI 2.1 port.
Keep in mind the permanent shortage of graphics cards in general significantly drove up prices of high-end and enthusiast-grade graphics cards. Therefore, it is not surprising that even entry-level products are expensive and sold at prices beyond their MSRPs.
But around $400 without taxes may not be that bad for Japan, where hardware tends to be rather expensive. Meanwhile, it is Galakuro’s price at Amazon, so consider it the minimal cost you can find there, at least for now.
We are pretty much sure that Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3050 will be close to impossible to find for $249 in the U.S., so the question is, how much more expensive is it going to get?