Nvidia's $249 RTX 3050 Sold Out Instantly In Japan For $400

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Galakuro
(Image credit: Galakuro)

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, as noticed by @momomo_us, 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?

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Anton Shilov
Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

17 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Phaaze88
    So just over a 60% markup. OUCH.
    Reply
  • VforV
    Phaaze88 said:
    So just over a 60% markup. OUCH.
    It's not even the whole OUCH we will see on launch day... not to mention a month or two after that.

    Who ever was complaining that RX 6500 XT was too expensive for $200 MSRP while having only 4GB Vram has no idea or complained intentionally for the sake of it how much worse RTX 3050 will be, because with it's 8GB Vram is perfectly made for miners, so expect the actual price to be double $500, at least.

    Out of these 2 expensive duds one will have a lower price and not be interesting to miners, the other one exactly the opposite. So nvidia "we care about gamers" do you really? Pffft.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    VforV said:
    Who ever was complaining that RX 6500 XT was too expensive for $200 MSRP while having only 4GB Vram has no idea or complained intentionally for the sake of it how much worse RTX 3050 will be, because with it's 8GB Vram is perfectly made for miners, so expect the actual price to be double $500, at least.
    Unlike the RX6500 which is barely faster than an RX580 and comes with crippled features, the RTX3050 will be much faster and all of the usual 3000-series features. Crypto-mining wise, its hash rate will be hamstrung from having only a 128bits-wide bus, so it may not be particularly good.

    If Nvidia wanted to make a great value crypto-mining GPU, it would have put 6GB of VRAM on a 192bits bus instead for 50% more memory bandwidth and access concurrency.
    Reply
  • VforV
    InvalidError said:
    Unlike the RX6500 which is barely faster than an RX580 and comes with crippled features, the RTX3050 will be much faster and all of the usual 3000-series features. Crypto-mining wise, its hash rate will be hamstrung from having only a 128bits-wide bus, so it may not be particularly good.

    If Nvidia wanted to make a great value crypto-mining GPU, it would have put 6GB of VRAM on a 192bits bus instead for 50% more memory bandwidth and access concurrency.
    Yet despite that, they will be gone in an instant at double the price, thanks to miners and a few gamers that are in the right spot and the right time and are willing to pay what this GPU is not worth because - "nvidia".

    If you think the majority that pays double the price are not miners you are naive.

    Also let's see which of these 2 will hold closer to MSRP at launch, hm? How about after 1 month?
    Reply
  • renz496
    VforV said:
    It's not even the whole OUCH we will see on launch day... not to mention a month or two after that.

    , because with it's 8GB Vram is perfectly made for miners, so expect the actual price to be double $500, at least.

    Out of these 2 expensive duds one will have a lower price and not be interesting to miners, the other one exactly the opposite. So nvidia "we care about gamers" do you really? Pffft.

    regardless of price vs 3050 the 6500XT have no reason to exist. just a pure cash grab to prey on desperate gamer that in need of GPU. rather than making 6500XT it is better to just increase the production of the original RX5500XT 4GB. smaller die size than the original navi 14, using cheaper 64 bit PCB limited to x4, have no decoder/encoder that other wise exist in this price range of GPU for a half decade, and the way i heard about it TSMC 6nm is one of the cheaper version of 7nm process. this GPU was specifically made to increase the profit margin of $200 GPU.
    Reply
  • San Pedro
    I live in Japan, and prices are always inflated here compared to the states for GPUs and CPUs especially. 50,000 yen is still pretty damn high for what it is. I bought a 5700xt like 2 years ago for that same price.

    Also, Amazon Japan definitely does not have good prices here on GPUs, actually they're usually worse than PC shops, so it's possible it might be cheaper... Maybe I'll check sometime this week if I head to PC store, but not really interested in 3050s.
    Reply
  • VforV
    renz496 said:
    regardless of price vs 3050 the 6500XT have no reason to exist. just a pure cash grab to prey on desperate gamer that in need of GPU. rather than making 6500XT it is better to just increase the production of the original RX5500XT 4GB. smaller die size than the original navi 14, using cheaper 64 bit PCB limited to x4, have no decoder/encoder that other wise exist in this price range of GPU for a half decade, and the way i heard about it TSMC 6nm is one of the cheaper version of 7nm process. this GPU was specifically made to increase the profit margin of $200 GPU.
    Firstly, I don't like both of these duds, the 6500 XT, nor the 3050, so let's be clear on that. All I'm saying is that the AMD one has a much higher change to get to gamers than the nvidia one and at a lower price. That does not mean is a great product or a good deal, it's a lesser evil case...

    Now, the reason they don't make more 5500 XT and instead opt for a 6nm similar GPU 6500 XT is because of that 6nm and because the 5500 XT would cannibalize from the 7nm production that is already not up to the demand.

    As for the exact profit and profit margin AMD will make on these GPUs funny, MLiD just posted this video yesterday on exactly this subject and you will be surprised how little that profit actually is... This lowest tier of GPUs is the least profitable one and this is the reason it's dying, if it were that profitable it would not be such a pathetic case from both nvidia and AMD.

    Watch and see those BOM and "amazing" profit margin numbers:
    qm_yHEr-d6UView: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm_yHEr-d6U
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    VforV said:
    Now, the reason they don't make more 5500 XT and instead opt for a 6nm similar GPU 6500 XT is because of that 6nm and because the 5500 XT would cannibalize from the 7nm production that is already not up to the demand.
    TSMC's N6 is just N7(P) with up to five of EUV (up from four in N7P) for the most density-critical parts, which means it still uses a lot of the same equipment as N7 for ~10 power and interconnect layers and the same equipment needed for N5 for the active layers. It isn't fab capacity that exists separately from everything else, it is a transition process to balance volume against EUV/N5 equipment scarcity.
    Reply
  • renz496
    VforV said:
    Now, the reason they don't make more 5500 XT and instead opt for a 6nm similar GPU 6500 XT is because of that 6nm and because the 5500 XT would cannibalize from the 7nm production that is already not up to the demand.

    the 6nm is still part of 7nm process. just like 12nm is enhance 16nm. AMD can just make 6nm on 5500XT just like what they did when they use 12nm on updated polaris that end up being use in RX590.

    VforV said:
    As for the exact profit and profit margin AMD will make on these GPUs funny, MLiD just posted this video yesterday on exactly this subject and you will be surprised how little that profit actually is...

    that is a well known fact for years that the sub $300 market did not generate much profit. but AMD most likely already get their margin when selling the GPU kit to AIB. the one that usually have to live with paper thin margin was AIB. but the cutting down on RX6500XT is way too much. maybe AMD was thinking of leaving the sub $300 market.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    renz496 said:
    the cutting down on RX6500XT is way too much. maybe AMD was thinking of leaving the sub $300 market.
    With sub-$300 GPUs accounting for most of the top-10 and about half of the GPUs overall on Steam's survey, abandoning the sub-$300 market might hurt PC gaming pretty bad in the long run and force game developers to target IGPs if they don't want to cut half of their potential player base off.
    Reply