Two days ago, we heard about a potential price hike for AMD graphics cards. The reason for this would be, as you might expect, the price hike for VRAM, which follows that of DDR5 memory (albeit to a lesser extent). Up until now, a post on the Board Channel forum had referred to an internal price increase at AMD. Nothing official as such, except that a PowerColor representative is indeed talking about a price increase on Reddit. Ah!
PowerColor talks about a price increase!
Well, to put it simply, if you’re a brand that works with AMD and/or NVIDIA, in practice you buy bundles comprising memory and a GPU to assemble on your graphics cards. However, if the price of this memory rises – we’re talking 30% for GDDR6 in particular – AMD passes on this price increase in its invoice. And so, as a GPU manufacturer, you have a choice: either you absorb the price rise, if you can, or you raise your prices too.
Evidently, on Reddit, a PowerColor official is announcing that a price hike will take place. Specifically, he’s announcing that starting next week, the week of Black Friday, promotions will be present and that this will be an opportunity to buy a card at a reduced price. However, a price hike is expected between now and the last week of the year. Unfortunately, we don’t know what the percentage of this increase will be… Let’s just hope it won’t be too brutal, since AMD cards were just starting to find their feet at the right price.
Finally, since PowerColor is one of AMD’s main partners, if the latter is forced to revise its prices upwards, then the same should apply to the Reds’ other partners. We’re thinking of Sapphire, ASUS, Gigabyte, etc.
