Acer expects shortages until Q3 2021 -- and how much does a GeForce card cost nowadays?

PC maker Acer confirms that the shortage of PC components will be a problem for a lot longer than most of us had hoped. The supply and demand balance of a lot of products is terrible -- components like video cards for example are very hard to find unless you want to pay absurd prices. This situation has been going on for months and there are no signs things are going to get better anytime soon.

Acer CEO: Expect shortages until Q3 2021

Acer chairman and CEO Jason Chen says shortages will remain until Q3 2021. He's talking about supply constraints that hit the production of laptops and desktop computers -- so this is more of a view from a PC maker's perspective.

DRAM prices are rising

In the same report, DigiTimes notes that prices of DRAM are expected to rise further in Q2 2021. The website cites Nanya Technology, which just reported sequential and on-year increases in February revenue.

What is the real price of a GeForce RTX 30 series card?

Video cards are one of the market segments where the shortages are noticed very hard. For many gamers, it's frustrating to see how little inventory stores have. Demand is a lot higher than what video card makers can bring to the market -- and unfortunately for gamers, the recent uptick in cryptocurrency prices further boosted demand for GPUs.

So suppose you really want to get a GeForce RTX 30 series video card, what is the price you should expect to pay? ExtremeTech has a nice chart from Michael Driscol. Below, you can see the median US pricing of the GeForce RTX 3060, RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070, RTX 3080, and RTX 3090. Prices skyrocketed in February across the entire RTX 30 series -- and started coming down a little around the RTX 3060 launch. At the moment, the median RTX 30 series video card sells for 250 to 300 percent of the MSRP. Not a pretty situation.

“The prices stopped going up exactly when the 3060 launched, so that can’t be a coincidence,” Driscoll told us. “Not a huge drop, but significant. For the increases, I have no way of confirming this, but I know many employers give out year-end bonuses in February, and people are starting to file and receive tax returns, which could be driving some of the price increase.”

ExtremeTech checked out some recently completed GPU auction on eBay and concludes that most new GeForce cards indeed sell for between $1,100 and $2,500.