How much do scalers make selling hard-to-buy PC hardware and consoles

You may not be able to buy the latest PC hardware yourself, but extenders are willing to sell it to you for a small profit.

These numbers come to us courtesy of blogger developer Michael Driscoll. Driscoll, an Oracle Data Engineer at USG Corp. during the day, applying his data skills during his overtime to the scaling market for console and PC hardware. According to Driscoll’s analysis, rate analysts have sold at least $82 million for Ryzen 5000 CPUs, RTX 30-series cards, RX 6000 GPUs, as well as Xbox Series X and PS5 consoles. Most of it is still selling stupidly above list price, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

For example, several 322 Ryzen 9 5950X CPUs were sold for an average of $1,275. Can’t GeForce RTX 3080 cards be with the list price of $699? Well, 7,222 of the 3080 sold for an average of $1,315.

Driscoll wrote custom scripts to collect results on eBay. As part of his research, he focused only on sold items to determine the average price, rather than increasing the bid. To try to troll the scalers, some have raised the price of hardware with no intention of buying. Because Driscoll’s research excludes $60,000 bids for GPUs and only includes actual completed sales, it’s likely a much better measure of the scaling market on eBay right now. hour.

Driscoll hates burned people as much as anyone. “I personally don’t mind who flipped their console because they already had one,” Driscoll told PCWorld. “I’m preoccupied with having someone buy the entire stock of Best Buy or having a bot that just buys them instantly to flip dozens or hundreds online.”

The Ryzen 7 5800X is also not a great choice for those with a large scale

Driscoll’s analysis indicates that AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800X is starting to get to the point where there may be no money for “normal expansion machines”. The 8-core CPU has an MSRP of $449, but the average price of the chip sold is $589. Over the past week, that price has rapidly dropped to $545, well below the price Driscoll thinks ordinary burners decide to bail out.

Driscoll defines a “normal extender” as someone who has presumably purchased the hardware at full retail and has decided to sell it at a profit. He assumes that this type pays taxes and shipping, so the quit watermark is much higher.

However, sophisticated scalpers use bots and have generally been successful trying to buy as much as they can on Day One to sell quickly at a profit. Complex scalers are still making money, says Driscoll.

Based on the pricing of the Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 9 5950X, Driscoll’s blog says he doesn’t expect those CPUs in demand to hit the MSRP until at least mid-January.

https://dev.to/driscoll42/an-analysis-of-the-80-million-ebay-scalping-market-for-xbox-ps5-amd-and-nvidia-f35

Could it be easier to find the Radeon RX 6800 XT?

The news looks a bit better for the Radeon RX 6800 XT, whose price has recently started to “drop sharply” (relatively speaking). The Radeon RX 6800XT has an MSRP of $649 but is already on sale for $1,277. However, the price of the card last week on eBay has dropped by 10% to 20%, which has Driscoll hoping that it will reach a reasonable price in a few weeks. That’s assuming there’s enough supply, of course.

With many scathing complaints from DIYers that a Radeon RX 6000 card can’t be found anywhere, the number of GPUs both red and green sold on eBay tells you how bad the supply is.

They are also not good for Nvidia’s latest generation Ampere-based cards. As we noted above, phenomenal sales of 7,222 were recorded on eBay for the GeForce RTX 3080, with an average price of $1,315 for the 699-MSRP GPU, according to Driscoll.

GeForce RTX 3090, at $1,499 US? On eBay, 3,749 units were sold for an average price of $2,250.

Michael Driscoll

The wide gap between AMD and Nvidia sales is interesting. Driscoll’s numbers show that extenders sold 454 Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6800 XT cards. That’s just 3% of the 15,224 GeForce RTX 30-series selling on eBay. However, it is unclear whether this spread is a signal of popularity or supply. A low Radeon number could also be an indication that even scalers can’t use the new AMD GPU.

Driscoll recognized that the focus on eBay was a weak point in his report. The data from this very large and organized market is easier to parse, but Driscoll said Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace and Discord, as well as forums, are likely where most of the regulators specialize. business will come, if only for better profit margins than eBay charges. Driscoll said he believes the entire expanding market for consoles and hardware is at least two to five times larger than it actually is.

If there’s one thing distraught PC fans should be grateful for: It’s not as bad as it is with consoles, as prices continue to rise. Driscoll’s numbers show about 29,795 next-gen Xbox consoles for sale on eBay, with the average price of the higher-end Xbox Series X being around $865. Driscoll says 32,964 PlayStation 5 consoles have been sold on eBay. Combined, that’s almost 63,000 game consoles that have been flipped. And as usual, the PlayStation 5 is slightly ahead of the new Xbox.

IDG