Don’t look now – well, actually do look, or you’ll have trouble reading the rest of this article – but the Nvidia RTX 4080 graphics card has now dropped below its MSRP (recommended price) in the UK, and considerably below in one case.
That would be at retailer AWD-IT (opens in new tab), which as VideoCardz (opens in new tab) reports, has reduced the Palit RTX 4080 GameRock to £1,099.99, which is £99 below the official UK MSRP. As the retailer notes, it’s actually a 23% reduction compared to the previous asking price of £1,429.99, and this is apparently a limited-time offer (or ‘crispy deal’ as AWD-IT couches it).
This isn’t the only sign of downward price movement for the RTX 4080 in the UK, as Overclockers has dropped its Palit GameRock (opens in new tab) (OmniBlack model, which is the same as the above, but without RGB lighting) to £1,169.99, again below the MSRP.
Furthermore, at eBuyer (opens in new tab) that same graphics card is £1,179.99, which is still £19 lower than the recommended price.
Analysis: A positive omen for that rumored Nvidia price cut?
Is this some kind of offer instigated by Palit which is a temporary thing? Perhaps, but with a drop of a hundred notes below MSRP, which is pretty substantial – even if it hardly makes us want to rush out and buy the RTX 4080 – this could be a hopeful sign that further price cuts are incoming (not just in the UK, but elsewhere around the globe).
As you may recall, the rumor mill believes that Nvidia is going to apply a price cut to the RTX 4080 next week, or at least in the near future, and that makes sense on a number of levels already.
December 13 is when AMD’s next-gen RDNA 3 GPUs hit the shelves, so it’d help to ensure competitivity in that respect, and it would also address the clear public perception that Nvidia is charging way too much for the RTX 4080 (and third-party custom models can be particularly ridiculous). We’ve also theorized about other reasons for a 4080 price cut which are indirectly related to the RTX 4070 Ti, basically to help ensure that this GPU can be viably priced cheaper than the canceled RTX 4080 12GB which it’s supposedly pretty much identical to (more on that here).
There are lots of good reasons to believe Nvidia could – and should – cut the MSRP on the RTX 4080 imminently, then. And this price movement in the UK represents a reasonably robust hint that this is exactly what’s about to happen.
Given all this, it’s pretty clear that anyone considering the RTX 4080 should wait a while to see if an official Nvidia price cut does come into play – and perhaps further discounts from retailers on top. If that does become the wider public perception, of course, it’ll further depress RTX 4080 sales, and make it more likely that Nvidia will take price-cutting action, at least in theory.
Fingers crossed, and while you wait, you can always entertain yourself by watching the eBay listings of scalpers panicking and trying to sell the RTX 4080 graphics cards they bought with the intention of price gouging, who are now realizing that they may not even be able to break even – or anywhere close to that, perhaps. Get those tiny violins out now…
