Intel’s Arc A380 desktop graphics card has been spotted for sale over in China, in a really strange situation – made all the more remarkable by the sky-high price.
As VideoCardz (opens in new tab) JD.com, a major retailer in China — the only country where Intel has launched the Arc Alchemist desktop line so far — has reportedly listed a Gunnir A380 Photon graphics card, but the price is at a ridiculous level: 3999 yuan (about $600 / £490 / AU$850).
Keep in mind that Intel’s suggested retail price (MSRP) for the A380 in China is set at a quarter from that asking price, so it’s pretty much an astronomical premium here (more than the soaring levels reached by Nvidia’s current GPUs at the height of last year’s graphics card crisis, when prices briefly tripled MSRP).
Note that the A380 graphics card in question is currently out of stock anyway and is only present in the Chinese market.
Analysis: placeholder prices – or collect interest early?
Why the enormously inflated prices? Well, as you might realize, the Intel Arc A380 isn’t even supposed to be available for sale in standalone form – JD.com is supposed to only sell pre-built PCs with the A380 inside (and the same goes for all retailers). So flogging a separate boxed copy of the graphics card seems to be breaking the rules anyway.
What can happen here is that the price is just a placeholder — it’s not clear if the card was briefly on sale, then sold out, or just out of stock — or the retailer jacked up the price tag to get rid of the expected early demand for the Arc A380.
In other words, JD.com might think it can get away with charging for the novelty of being able to buy the first Intel Arc desktop GPU (at that asking price, you’d even be wondering if maybe as a collector’s item, maybe a piece of graphics card history).
Be that as it may, the pricing makes absolutely no sense given the entry-level performance that the A380 offers, and may well be readjusted when the Gunnir A380 actually goes into stock. There is of course no way to compare the asking price to any other retailer in China as there is no stock of the A380 available elsewhere.
For now, this remains something of an anomaly, although it’s very interesting to see that a standalone Arc graphics card could – presumably – become available for purchase in a very short time. From what Intel officially said, we only expected Arc desktop GPUs to be present in OEM PCs in June.
That’s all for the Chinese market, of course, and global availability won’t start until a bit later – maybe late July if we’re lucky, but possibly closer to August, and again Arc desktop products will only have prebuilt PCs to go with it to begin (or so we were told).
This article was previously published on Source link
