The mining era and GPU shortage might be over, but scalpers are still making chaos in the GPU market. Scalpers have gone to town on Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4090, selling cards at well over MSRP on eBay — with some cards priced at $4000 and higher.
eBay scalper listings start at $2,299, and most prices sit in the $2500 to $3200 range. At the high end, we've seen them listed as high as $4,499 — though most of the sold listings are in the $2500 range (our colleagues at PCGamer did some math and found that about 135 units were sold yesterday, with an average selling price of $2,524).
But what's especially crazy is that many of the RTX 4090 listings are pre-order listings. This means the seller doesn't physically have the GPU — and you'll have to wait for the seller to get the card from the retailer they bought it from before they can even send it to you (and this is assuming nothing goes wrong).
It looks like people are buying, though — the 135 sold yesterday account for about a third of the listings. The RTX 4090 went on sale yesterday — and sold out immediately, so desperate customers have no choice but to pay the scalped markup or wait for restocks.
Scalpers buying up RTX 4090s isn't surprising to see, as this has happened at every GPU launch over the past several years.
Is Nvidia Keeping Availability Low on Purpose?
The GPU market is in a good state for gamers, thanks to the decline of cryptocurrency mining. This means there is a chance Nvidia wants to stifle RTX 40 series availability — at least for a little while, as Nvidia and its AIB partners are sitting on a mountain of unsold RTX 30 series cards. This is why we're seeing pretty big price discounts on high-end RTX 30 series GPUs at the moment.
Nvidia also overbought a ton of TSMC 4N silicon at the height of the GPU shortage last year. This will force the company to try and make the most profit off of silicon by selling cards at the highest prices possible, giving Nvidia even more incentive to keep availability low.
Even if Nvidia is keeping supply artificially low, we doubt the company will stifle the market as badly as the GPU shortage of 2020 and 2021. But we suspect availability will take some time to return to normal for the RTX 4090, as well as the RTX 4080 16GB and the RTX 4080 12GB when they launch later this year.
