A PowerColor insider is offering the brand’s customers guidance on when to buy a graphics card: In short, do it soon, because price increases are coming. But you might want to wait for the Black Friday sale to kick in first, as VideoCardz reports.
Since the start of the year, when graphics card prices were utterly ridiculous following the launch of the Nvidia RTX 5000 series and AMD RX 9000 range, they’ve slowly been coming down and returning to some semblance of normalcy—or at least close to MSRP. But in recent months, the prices on top cards have started to rise again in the wake of AI-driven shortages. And as NAND Flash prices have spiked in the past few months, graphics card prices are expected to follow suit in the new year.
PowerColor is at least warning its customers…and generating sale hype at the same time. We’ve heard from several sources in recent weeks that price hikes are coming in 2026, and that memory shortages might delay the launch of the RTX 50 Super series, but this is the first time that a board partner has been frank about it.
A PowerColor representative who goes by Steven online said in a recent Reddit post: “Regarding GPU holiday pricing [gamers should] wait until Sunday for discounts to kick in.” But more important, he said to “buy before the last week of the year before prices kick up.”
No, it’s not the official line, but it’s as close as we can get to it without a press release. Price increases are on their way, and they’re not likely to be tiny, either. Memory prices have jumped over 170% in recent months. If even a fraction of that is carried over to GPUs, we could be looking at tens, or even hundreds, of dollars being added throughout the product stack.
Price changes of a percent here and there wouldn’t be worth warning about. Big price hikes are. We’ve all been warned.