Micro Center has released a customer advisory saying that it has raised its GPU prices to be competitive with major online retailers, but they will be offering bundle discounts to DIY builders in order to keep down the price increase.

Although the huge demand will give benefit GPU makers in the short term, the manufacturers are worried that cryptomining will compromise the long term market by moving gamers to other platforms. AMD were more affected in the first stage and it was the first to address this issue by releasing its RX Vega series of GPUs in bundles. NVIDIA has suggested its retail partners to make arrangements and sell GPUs first to gamers.

It looks like that AMD and NVIDIA are doing more arrangements behind the scenes since several retailers have introduced strategies to mitigate the price hikes. A few days ago, Newegg has introduced a small rule for all new GPU buyers, if you want take a GPU you have to buy a monitor as well. The Canadiar retailer Memory Express has disabled online orders of GPUs pushing customers to go in local stores.

While high GPU prices could be positive for retailers, this incredible prices are keeping customers away from hardware upgrades or from build new gaming PCs. If consumers aren't able to spend money on new systems, we will see less sales of other hardware as well like CPUs and motherboards.



Source: Micro Center