How tariffs will impact the pricing of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX series

Posted on Monday, September 24 2018 @ 10:48 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
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The ongoing trade war between the US and China will have an impact on the pricing of PC components in the States. A tariff rate of 10 percent goes into effect today, and it affects pretty much everything, including motherboards, PSUs, cases, coolers, RAM kits, HDDs, GPUs, and CPUs. Also impacted are pre-made PCs and servers, as well as laptops, plus peripherals like mice and keyboards.

WCCF Tech spoke to some firms and got to hear that video cards like NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2080 line will get quite a bit more expensive. Here's a new price list from MSI:
Here is one of the lists we received with post-tariff pricing going live very soon (if not already):

  • RTX 2080 Ti Gaming X Trio: $1231 to $1310
  • RTX 2080 Ti DUKE 11G OC: $1212 to $1290
  • RTX 2080 Ti VENTUS 11G OC: $1203 to $1280
  • RTX 2080 Gaming X Trio: $849 to $900
  • RTX 2080 DUKE 8G OC: $840 to $890
  • RTX 2080 VENTUS 8G OC: $830 to $880
  • AIBs are rushing to minimize the impact by moving production to another country, like Taiwan. For companies like MSI an Gigabyte this is expected to take two months at most, but smaller firms like Zotac do not have an existing manufacturing capacity in Taiwan and will have to suffer lower margins as they will be unable to pass the full cost to customers.

    Here's a comment from an anonymous source at an AIB:
    “We should only have a month’s gap from now before Taiwan manufacturing is online. Rest of the line i.e. [mentions various of their RTX models] will be on the new assembly in Taiwan. The timeline [of shipment schedule getting caught up in tariff] threw a wrench into our plans. Originally we thought we would have some of the prelaunch allocation [reserved for Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg and other retailers] left over to give to SI partners but because the etailer pre-launch prepaid order volume exceeded the NVidia allocation, we are stuck with giving them the pre-tariff cost structure we had to allocate 100% of our prelaunch allocation out to the actual prelaunch partners first. Whatever we can’t fulfill this week we’re going to absorb the 10% between us and the etailer to still fulfill end customer’s orders meaning all SI orders, for now, are subjected to almost a +10% increase with us sharing some of the cost”. – Anon AIB


    About the Author

    Thomas De Maesschalck

    Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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