Following up on his research from last month, Chicago-based Oracle data engineer Michael Driscoll has returned with an updated analysis that gives us an idea of how much bank scalpers are making from NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards. The reality is certainly maddening for enthusiasts who are on the sidelines and simply want to get their hands on one at MSRP, as Driscoll found that scalpers managed to sell at least 49,580 Ampere GPUs on eBay and sneaker site StockX for an incredible $15.2 million in profit (total sales were $61.5 million, $6.8 million of which went to the auction sites and PayPal).
Prices for NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs also increased by as much as 25 percent due to tariffs, with the GeForce RTX 3080 reaching a median price of $1,300. That happens to be an absurd 86 percent increase over the graphics card’s original MSRP ($699). The scalping price for the GeForce RTX 3090 appears to have stayed the same, however.
“I had predicted the launch of the 3060 Ti would bring pricing down, and that was very wrong,” Driscoll admitted. “This is in no small part due to the new tariffs on graphics cards which hiked prices by 7-25%, and scalpers… hiked their prices just as much. The 3060 went from 160% launch price 1/1/21 to now 210% launch price and has recently fallen down to 190% of launch price. The 3080 is a similar story, from 170% at Christmas to now 200%. The 3070 has grown more modestly to “only” 170%, though the 3090 seems unaffected.”
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series Median Pricing in Raw Dollars
| GPU Graph | MSRP | Total Sold | Median Price | Past Week Median Price | Casual Scalper Break Even | Sophisticated Scalper Break Even | Total Sales | Estimated Scalper Profits | Estimated eBay/PayPal Profits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RTX 3060 Ti | $399 | 5539 | $667 | $800 | $498 | $406 | $3,839,423 | $974,121 | $434,582 |
| RTX 3070 | $499 | 11684 | $809 | $867 | $623 | $507 | $9,532,680 | $2,092,119 | $1,077,600 |
| RTX 3080 | $699 | 14066 | $1300 | $1449 | $869 | $711 | $19,246,356 | $6,313,471 | $2,233,617 |
| RTX 3090 | $1499 | 7775 | $2159 | $2109 | $1849 | $1523 | $17,426,583 | $2,914,143 | $1,973,795 |
| Total | N/A | 39064 | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | $50,045,042 | $12,293,854 | $5,719,594 |
Driscoll also shared bad news for PC gamers who are considering getting a Pascal or Turing card to tide them over. Since of the launch of Ampere, NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 20, RTX 16, GTX 1000, and GTX 900 Series have all increased in price from 33 to 100 percent.
“For Pascal cards, initially they stayed stable, but the new tariffs have increased the resale prices of all GTX 10 series cards, by about 50% for most of the cards,” Driscoll noted. “Turing’s RTX 20 series is also affected though again to a lesser extent, mostly impacting the lower end cards, the 2060s and 2060 Supers. However, the real rise in pricing was for the Turing RTX 16 series cards, all of them going up 50-60% in price since the launch of Ampere. It doesn’t stop with those either, even the GTX 900 series have seen price nearly double for a few cards, though still well below their initial MSRP.”
Driscoll has prepared similar analyses for how much scalpers are making off of AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 Series GPUs and Ryzen 5000 Series CPUs. These items generated $944,000 and $946,000 in profit for scalpers, respectively.