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Comment by kllrnohj | Hacker News Reader

Take Nvidia's MSRP with a grain of salt. Unless there's a founders edition card on the market, the number can be complete fantasy instead of mostly fantasy (eg, 4070 Ti MSRP is $800 but those cards don't really exist, they all start at $850+).

Right now Nvidia is playing a game where the MSRP cards can't be sold at a profit, so you'll only see a token amount of them exist before going out of stock to never return. Hence why even the 4080, which by all accounts has barely sold at all, still has a bunch of out of stock SKUs - coincidentally all the ones that are "MSRP." Realistically the 4090 then also is more like a $1800 card.

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The 4090s costs >=4k Euros in Germany right now. So that MSRP is completely unrealistic.

Still i think, even with these crazy prices, the price per performance increased compared to the previous generation. The 4090 is a very good card.

There goes the time of the 700 Euros high end models.

Obviously the 4K is a typo. /s/4/2/g

> (eg, 4070 Ti MSRP is $800 but those cards don't really exist, they all start at $850+).

here's newegg right now:

https://i.imgur.com/al8N35W.png

stop listening to a bunch of rabble-rousing techtubers lol, the pitchfork brigade isn't always right.

Of the 24 4070 Ti cards for sale on Newegg, exactly 2 of them are $799.

You're kinda proving the point here while framing it as a counter argument lol

Sorry, what? You said "those MSRP 4070 cards don't exist at all", I'm confused what you meant by that when there clearly are several models on Newegg at the advertised MSRP.

Yes, premium card models exist and have always existed, for people who want to pay extra to get a quieter cooler or another few % OC performance.

That's different from "MSRP is fake because those cards don't exist and nothing is available at MSRP".

10-series MSRP is an example of a fake MSRP - FE was priced above "MSRP" and all the partner cards slotted in above FE. 4070 Ti is nothing like that, you can go buy a 4070 Ti for MSRP if you want, they definitely exist, and will likely continue to exist.

I checked the listing for 4080s and there is, unsurprisingly, currently a model available for MSRP there as well. It's backordered until tuesday (a whole 36 hours!), but, I thought you said they never restock after the initial drop?

https://www.newegg.com/pny-geforce-rtx-4080-vcg408016tfxxpb1...

Like yes you're not wrong that partners would rather make the high-margin cards and they do everything in their power to avoid selling at MSRP, but, that's because they're profit-seeking middlemen with a stranglehold on the supply of a scarce resource, not because they can't afford to make cards at MSRP.

Just like Zotac and EVGA - PNY isn't losing money on those cards either. They may not like what they're making, they'd rather sell you a corvette than an econobox, but they're not losing money either. That part is not true and is as hyperbolic as your inventory claims: they still make money, they just don't make as much as they want.

Like yup absolutely the margin is worse on an Accord than a sports car. Agreed. The dealer still isn't losing money on the econobox at MSRP, no matter how much they wail and gnash about it, and it's not good for consumers to just increase the price so middlemen make a fat margin on basic-tier shit.

People generally look back on car dealers scalping Hondas in the 80s (and cars/trucks during the pandemic) as being a bad thing, but, somehow the board partners have gotten consumers into this idea that margins for middlemen are a good thing when it's GPUs.

I remember articles on the 3000 series where manufacturers were reporting that Nvidia was selling the chips themselves at higher price than the MSRP for the entire card. So ye, take that with a scoop of salt =P

lol, it was one interview from a CEO who was mad that he had to clearance-price 3090s after the mining boom ended, and even GN told you they thought it was dubious and needed to be taken with a bunch of salt. Igor’s Lab says their partner contacts said 2021 was a “10x year” for them, and that’s easily confirmable for at least one partner with public financials data.

https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/TW/ROCO/6150/financia...

https://www.igorslab.de/en/evga-pulls-the-plug-with-loud-ban...

Some people really do be seeing EVGA selling a 2080 Ti for $949 and Zotac for $999 and then argue the other partners magically can’t afford to sell for less than $1400. Or think that anything has changed since then.

We call them… gamers.

It’s honestly crazy to see techies embracing the digital-car-dealership model over the Tesla model. You really really want to fight against scalper-bots instead of just putting in an order on Steam for a 3060 Ti at MSRP and having it come in a month or two?

And then everyone acts like rma is only possible with partners… bruh I can rma a cpu to AMD or Intel just fine without a middleman involved.

Unironically you are buying into smoothtalk from brylcreemed CEOs who were scalping 3080s in their first-party webstores for triple MSRP and even scalping directly to Ebay (lol MSI) literally weeks before their media tour, they came crying directly after prices crashed as part of a media push to get NVIDIA to refund their excess mining orders. Gamers are the most credulous rubes on the planet, NVIDIA and EVGA can agree on that much.

https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/j6idky/msi_scalpi...

and conversely - partners love what NVIDIA is doing with the 30-series price fixing right now! Their margins on 30-series are great, they're not losing money on deep discounts like they are with RDNA2 products. That's not good for consumers, but hey, somehow they've convinced consumers they're on their side instead of a middleman with their hand out.

Again, as you can see from the 2080 Ti example, MSRP isn't "losing money" territory, in fact they can probably even go a bit under MSRP (EVGA knocked another 5% off), they just don't like it, at 5% under MSRP EVGA was probably running actual zero margin. It's when prices go 30-50% under MSRP that they lose money. And NVIDIA is doing a great job with 30-series keeping prices at or above MSRPs and making sure nobody breaks ranks and cuts prices. Trusts are super effective at maintaining margins, and consumers love making sure partners get their margins, right?

> Igor’s Lab says their partner contacts said 2021 was a “10x year” for them, and that’s easily confirmable for at least one partner with public financials data.

So.. during a year of highly inflated GPU prices, GPU vendors who sold everything far above MSRP made a bunch of money?

No shit, Sherlock. What does that have to do with Nvidia's well known, well sourced MSRP games?

And since you're so focused on the 30xx series, reminder that the MSRP of the 3070 was $500 and even now at the end of the product life it's still slim pickings below $600. 3080's MSRP was also $700. But again, even now at EOL there's very little at that price point. The major brands are all $900+

What MSRP games? Can you cite some specific claims from various sources that aren't just the EVGA CEO that GN said to "take with a bunch of salt" and that Igor confirmed doesn't reflect the other partners' margins or sentiment?

I provided actual sources and numbers here, "well-known, well-sourced" is just "trust me bro" if you don't provide those sources.

Again: 2080 Ti is a great example of how those claims aren't really true. There was nothing stopping the other partners from offering MSRP cards just like EVGA and Zotac. They could even have gone under MSRP, just like EVGA.

Partners won't do it because they don't make enough money, not because they lose money. EVGA and Zotac show they're not losing money doing it, they just don't want to.

It's car dealerships whining they're only making 5% on a budget car instead of 15% on a corvette.

EVGA stopped making GPUs entirely, citing among other things the inability to sustain MSRP pricing. Really odd you'd use them as an example unless you were just entirely unaware of that recent breakup?

So... No, other companies can't do what EVGA did just like EVGA couldn't keep doing what EVGA did. Hence why they basically went bankrupt doing it (rather, they obviously didn't drop 70+% of their revenue if it was a healthy profit margin as you are so insistent on claiming)

Zotac also had MSRP 2080 Ti cards though? Did you read the other example I gave?

Anyway, I'd still love to see your sources, but, if you can't provide any then I think we're done here. I gave you real numbers and you've ignored them several times in favor of supposition and imagination.

EVGA quit because they knew the mining crash was going to lead to a couple of very slow years, just like after the 2018 mining crash. I've already stated my problems with their argument: they made tons of money during the mining boom, and the claims that they were losing money were limited to the deep clearance pricing they had to do after the mining crash.

You have acknowledged most of these individual points but just don't seem to accept the synthesis of the whole: the EVGA guy wasn't really presenting a fair and honest big picture, that's why GN told you to "take him with a big grain of salt" and Igor's Lab's partners said they didn't understand where he was coming from.

This may be difficult, but sometimes individuals will go to media and present a slanted narrative, especially when they have a financial interest in doing so or are generally upset. What the EVGA guy said wasn't really true, or was very narrowly true.

And to be fair, there is a lot to be upset about, NVIDIA definitely is not gracious to the partners. But if they play it right, it's a guaranteed 10% margin on all their sales. 200k cards a week times $500 ASP times 10% margin is quite a bit of money, and that's EVGA alone.

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