Don’t look now – well, actually look, or you’ll have trouble reading the rest of this article – but the Nvidia RTX 4080 graphics card has now dropped below the suggested retail price (recommended price) in the UK, and well below on one occasion.
That would be at an AWD-IT retail store (opens in a new tab)which as VideoCardz (opens in a new tab) reports, has discounted GameRock’s Palit RTX 4080 to £1,099.99, which is £99 below the official UK suggested retail price. As the retailer notes, this is actually a 23% reduction from the previous asking price of £1,429.99, and it’s apparently a limited-time offer (or ‘crunchy deal’ as AWD-IT puts it).
This isn’t the only sign of the RTX 4080 price drop in the UK as Overclockers have abandoned it Palit GameRock (opens in a new tab) (OmniBlack model which is the same as above but without RGB lighting) down to £1,169.99, again below the suggested retail price.
In addition, at eBuyers (opens in a new tab) the same graphics card costs £1,179.99, which is still £19 less than the recommended price.
Analysis: Positive omen for this Nvidia price cut rumor?
Is this some temporary offer initiated by Palit? Perhaps, but with a drop of a hundred notches below the suggested retail price, which is quite significant – even if it doesn’t make us want to rush into buying an RTX 4080 – it could be a promising sign that further price cuts are coming (not only in the UK but in other parts of the world).
As you may recall, rumors say that Nvidia will drop the price of the RTX 4080 next week, or at least in the near future, and that already makes sense on many levels.
December 13th is the day the next generation AMD RDNA 3 GPUs hit store shelves, so it would help keep you competitive in that regard as well as address the clear public perception that Nvidia is overcharging for the RTX 4080 (and third-party custom models can be especially funny). We’ve also theorized about other reasons for the 4080’s price cut that are indirectly related to the RTX 4070 Ti, mainly to ensure that this graphics card could be cost-effectively cheaper than the canceled RTX 4080 12GB with which it is said to be nearly identical (more on this here).
There are plenty of good reasons to believe that Nvidia could – and should – drop the RTX 4080’s suggested retail price soon. And this UK price move is a pretty solid indication that that’s about to happen.
With all that said, it’s pretty clear that anyone considering an RTX 4080 should wait a while to see if Nvidia’s official price cut comes into play – and perhaps additional discounts from retailers. If this becomes the wider public, it will of course further drive down sales of the RTX 4080 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 have fun watching the eBay auctions of panicky scalpers trying to sell RTX 4080 graphics cards they bought with the intention of jacking up prices, who now realize they may not even be able to break even – or perhaps somewhere close to it. Pull out that little violin now…