I’m starting to think I got the last good GPU deal

In November, around the U.S. Black Friday deal rush, I bought a new graphics card. That was nine months ago, and I think it might be the last time — at least for the foreseeable future — that I’ll get a decent price on any computer hardware. In this week’s issue of Boost Mode, I’ll brag a little about my find, and explain why something that good is unlikely to come again any time soon.

The last good deal

First of all, a special thank you to SlickDeals forum user N3RD_01, who spotted this deal on Zotac’s official web store. It was an RTX 5070 Ti, a card with an official price of $750 USD from Nvidia, on sale for $637.49. Why the discount? It was an “Open Box” item — someone had bought it and returned it, and Zotac certified it as working and good enough to sell again. Incidentally, that’s why I didn’t write up the deal for PCWorld: We’re okay with refurbished most of the time, but most people balk at open box items.

SlickDeals

I was a little worried, too. But that $100+ discount wasn’t the only factor to consider. The same user who posted the deal pointed out that you could combine it with a PayPal holiday offer — the company’s “Pay in 4” system, split up the price over four payments with no interest. At the time, If I bought the card via PayPal and used that option, I could save an additional 20 percent as a rebate to my PayPal balance.

That brought the effective price down to $510, for a $750 card that was often hard to find for under a grand. It also came with a two-year warranty, and buying directly from Zotac meant that it would be easy enough to claim if something was off with the hardware.

I couldn’t resist, and I pulled the trigger. After three months I’d paid it off, and it’s a worthy upgrade over the 3070 I’d been using since 2021. A happy ending for a PC gamer, right? Combined with my desktop’s existing Ryzen 7800X3D and 64GB of RAM, I’ve got a setup that should last me years and years before new games start to actually push its performance limits.

For the sake of comparison, I checked the current price on that same Zotac RTX 5070 Ti. It’s going for $1300, a $550 increase over the $750 list price from November. Ouch. (Though I’ll point out that you can find a 5070 Ti a little cheaper elsewhere.) A mid-range, pre-built gaming desktop that I recommended for a friend at around the same time was $1000, which I considered a good deal. That same machine is now $1500, a straight 50 percent increase. Similar price jumps are happening across the industry.

CamelCamelCamel

How we got here

You probably know that RAM and storage prices are incredibly inflated, about 500 percent over what they were just a year ago, because of manufacturer demand from “AI” data centers. That’s causing a lot of other problems, too, but the primary one for my job is that it’s causing a K-shaped split in the PC market, as affordable computers get less and less powerful, and powerful computers get more and more expensive.

Nvidia, AMD, and the “big three” memory producers are raking in literally trillions of dollars, but the broader PC market is suffering. Smaller manufacturers like Framework are being squeezed to the breaking point, and even giants like Lenovo and Dell are struggling. If recent reports are accurate, memory manufacturing capacity is already sold out for all of 2027. So even if the “AI” bubble pops today, we’re in for a year or more of wildly inflated prices. Other companies, notably the China-based CXMT, are trying to fill the manufacturing vacuum. But that might just slow the price problems, not reverse them.

Ballistix

Speedy memory is a core component of graphics cards, of course. The one I bought has 16GB of GDDR7 memory, a luxury I would have thought ridiculous a few years ago…but 8GB of graphics memory is now a little spare for the latest AAA games. So the supply of new cards is going down as data centers gobble up manufacturing capacity. That’s why the prices have gone up. And it won’t stop with the memory that goes into graphics cards — data centers need chips too, many of them made by Nvidia, AMD, and Intel. So the GPUs themselves are next on the chopping block.

No end in sight

It keeps getting worse. CPUs are being affected as data centers keep being expanded. Motherboard sales are going down as PC builders strap in for the rough market. Even technology as niche as hard drives — the spinning discs most consumers thought completely obsolete, unless they’re doing large data backups or building a NAS — are going up in price.

There has only been one major desktop graphics card announcement in 2026: AMD’s Radeon RX 9050, which will be sold to PC manufacturers in configurations as low as 4GB. That’s the first time that any desktop card, at any price, has been sold with 4GB of memory since 2022.

ASRock

I could go on here. Suffice it to say, I’m glad I got in a pretty good round of PC upgrades in 2025, right before all this madness started snowballing. I’m not trying to boast here, I didn’t perform some masterful act of market prediction — I was just lucky enough to buy new hardware at the right time.

What do we do now?

What advice can I offer? Not much, I’m afraid. The best time to buy or upgrade a gaming PC was 2025. The second-best time is now… even though now is absolutely awful. Because based on everything we’ve seen and all the expert analysis, prices will keep rising for all of 2027, and possibly beyond. If you’re not in a position to buy powerful PC hardware now…then I’d focus on getting through that gaming backlog, or maybe sticking to new indie games that aren’t looking to wow you with visual splendor.

Here I’ll mention that every year I recommend a great collection of new PC games that you can play on low-power hardware. There are dozens of them across the series. You could also look into services like GeForce NOW or Shadow to offload the hardware to a streaming setup, though that’s leaning into some of the “own nothing and be happy” doomerism that’s making the rounds.

Or maybe just…find another hobby for a while. I like D&D. I hear birdwatching is big with the kids. And I used to think that kayaking and photography were prohibitively expensive at high levels. But I could sell my desktop PC right now, and buy a brand new sea kayak and a real camera to take photos of birds on it.

Michael Crider

Here’s one that I took on the Delaware River. Food for thought.

Cool stuff from around the web

• This Game Costs $200: Yeah, it really does. An indie dev created a super-basic Steam game at the service’s maximum $200 price, and made over a million bucks…but lost almost all of it in Steam returns right away. It was an interesting idea that may have uncovered some shady stuff going on behind the scenes.
• PS5 streaming comes to SteamOS: This is pretty dang neat! Someone made a third-party app that can tap into the PlayStation 5’s proprietary streaming system, used for PS Remote Play and devices like the PlayStation Portal. It can run on the Steam Deck or other Linux-based setups. Hopefully it sticks around, and Sony doesn’t throw up any roadblocks.
• New AM4 motherboard with PCIe 5.0 support: Motherboards with support for older CPUs and cheaper DDR4 RAM are coming back into fashion because of…well, you read this far in the newsletter. Here’s a relaunched Gigabyte design with support for at least some newer tech, including PCIe 5.0 graphics cards and Wi-Fi 6E. Sadly, gen 5 SSD support is not included.

Gigabyte

• You can upgrade an old RTX 2080 Ti to 22GB: On the subject of making the most of old hardware…what if you could massively boost the VRAM in a former flagship card? One repair service is offering customers an upgrade to the card that doubles its memory, complete with the BIOS flash necessary to get it working. It costs about $150 — not too bad, though you do have to ship your card to the UAE.
• Game CEO says the industry will switch to cloud streaming within 3 years: The guy in charge of Take-Two, Rockstar, and GTA VI thinks that it won’t be long before most games are delivered via streaming. Hey, guy with enough money to buy senators by the dozen: Maybe you could do something to stop that? No? Just gonna let it happen and exploit people? Okay.

Game pick of the week: Windblown

Motion Twin

I’ve had an itch for fast roguelike combat ever since I beat Dead Cells. Lucky for me, the folks who made that game also make other games. Like this one! Windblown is a top-down combat game in the same vein as Hades, but about twice as fast. And you play as tiny, adorable animals, wielding weapons that look like they’d throw your back out.

Windblown does a couple of things I really like that set it apart from a sea of similar games coming out right now. First, the vibes are immaculate. Despite the breakneck pace — the little critters are so fast they each have a jetpack — the world is calm and soothing. It also uses a weapon-switching mechanic that keeps you on your toes, constantly looking for the right combination of primary and secondary tools.

The game is in early access right now, but it’s got plenty to chew on, including deep co-op and screen-filling bosses. It’s $25 on Steam.

That’s all for this week. To get my editorials, news picks, and game recommendations delivered straight to your inbox, you can sign up for Boost Mode on the PCWorld Newsletter hub. Check out The Full Nerd, Prompt Mode for “AI” tips, Safe Mode to keep your PC and gadgets secure, and Smart Mode to boost your productivity.