NVIDIA AIB-partner sources offer clearer picture of how tariffs will affect their prices

The tariffs imposed by the Trump administration has been reported to be likely to impose price hikes on PC components such as GPUs. This is potentially bad news for fans of the RTX 20-series, particularly as it begins to become available from today (September 24, 2018). The tech blog WCCFTech has reached out to its contacts in the NVIDIA AIB partner space to confirm the effects of these tariffs.

For a start, it appears that the tariffs will cause MSI to announce relatively high pricing for this new line. The RTX 2080 VENTUS 8GB OC'd product will be as much as US$880 after the tariffs. This increases to up to $1290 for the RTX 2080 Ti DUKE 11GB OC'd model, with an upper limit of $1390 for the RTX 2080 Ti Gaming X Trio card.

Other big AIB partners (e.g. ASUS) reportedly anticipate price hikes too; however, WCCFTech believes that this will be temporary due to their established manufacturing presences in Taiwan. Smaller companies like Aorus, however, may not be so lucky, and may have to pass their distended costs on to customers in the longer term. The blog also estimates that more immediate pricing for the new RTX cards will be up to $80 more than originally intended for the 2080 Ti, and up to $50 for the 2080.

According to a WCCFTech source, the AIB with which they are associated is also likely to face a shortage of approximately 10% in units to offer to system integrators (SI) rather than pre-launch partners (e.g. Amazon). This is likely to lead to increased costs for SI products as well. Therefore, AIBs may be absorbing hits to their profits in several respects for some time to come. This may have yet more impact on NVIDIA'S share price as well. 

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