GIGABYTE Warning Investors About Pending GPU Price Drops

It’s beginning to look like the end of price-gouged graphics cards is soon upon us, thanks in large part to the fact that the mining craze is dying down. That in turn is tied to the fact that there is a lot of stock left of Pascal-based GeForce GPUs, which isn’t exactly ideal when NVIDIA’s next-gen Turing series is expected to launch in August or September (based on current rumor – I don’t have information to back that up).

Our GPUs returning to their original SRP (or at least close) has been heavily rumored the past week, but now Hexus is reporting that GIGABYTE is telling its shareholders that GPU prices would soon be dropping, and in effect eat into revenue. TIL: GIGABYTE is a publicly traded company.

I for one am not about to shed a single tear for any investor who decided to ride the mining wave in this way; bursts like that are nothing more than gifts, not trends expected to continue indefinitely. While shareholders and the vendors themselves have benefited greatly from the insatiable appetite for performance from miners, gamers (aka: the target audience of most of these cards) have had to pay way over SRP for their GPUs, so it’ll be great to see that issue disappear.

The problem, of course, is that NVIDIA is expected to launch Turing (or some other architecture) in a couple of months. News of a Gamescom event invite hit the web this past week, although NVIDIA is keeping the true reason for the trip close to its chest. Since the rumor basically all year has been that new GPUs would launch around the August timeframe, it seems likely that the dearth of new GPU hardware will be soon behind us.

If prices for Pascal (and not to mention AMD’s Vega and Polaris) goes back to normal, it might be a bit of a hard sell for those who believe NVIDIA is in fact on the verge of releasing a new GPU series, currently pegged as the GTX 1100 series. Personally, if I waited this long, I’d hold out longer, but everyone’s situation is different. If I had to wait another two months to game at all, my opinion would sway quite a bit.

What do you guys think? Buy current GPUs at SRP, or hold out for Turing? Or… hold out for potential GPU price drops that might bring Pascal costs below SRP because of excess stock? That’s speculation on my part, but it wouldn’t be bad to see.