Well, Nvidia just well and truly dropped the microphone with its announcement of the Nvidia RTX 30xx series cards. One of the biggest announcements of all is the lower tier of the new cards the RTX 3070 will allegedly have double the performance of the current-gen flagship 2080 Ti and is only $499 USD.
In Australia, we pay more for technology in general. After the conversion, GST (government tax on goods and services), people are probably assuming the price won’t work out to be too nice for us Australians.
Well, I was surprised when I saw that the new cards from Nvidia are not going to be that expensive. The Nvidia site states the 3070 will start from $809 Australian dollars. Of course, this price doesn’t factor in markup from the retailers themselves or any other price bolt-ons.
The 3080 is being listed as starting from $1139 and finally, the flagship powerhouse 3090 is listed as starting from $2429. We will have to wait for the launch to see which retailers stick close to the MSRP. There are also third-party cards which could be cheaper options as well.
Looking at the prices, it appears that maybe these Australian prices do factor in taxes. The RTX 3080 is $700 USD which at the current exchange rate is $963 AUD, which means almost $200 for taxes and whatnot.
Considering the 3070 is meant to be twice as fast as the 2080 Ti, this would make it over half the price and an absolute steal of a deal if you’re not concerned with the higher tier cards. I would probably save your pennies for the 3080.
It’ll be interesting to see what AMD reveals with its new Big Navi architecture, the ball is in their court now that Nvidia has well and truly dropped a bomb on them.
