The best time to buy a graphics card

Graphics cards are the one tech product where Black Friday barely matters. What matters is the launch cycle, and once you can read it, the buying moment is obvious.

The cycle

NVIDIA and AMD launch a new generation roughly every two years, top cards first, mid-range six to nine months later. The moment a new mid-range card lands, the previous generation's equivalent drops — often 20 to 30 percent within a fortnight — because retailers need to clear stock and the new card has reset the price-per-performance line.

So the cheapest way into a given performance level is the previous generation's card, bought in the month after its successor launches.

Reading the current market

Check which cards launched in the last three months. Their predecessors are the ones to watch. Check which cards are rumoured for the next three months; their current versions are the ones to avoid buying at full price.

Which retailer

Scan, Overclockers and Box are the UK specialists and they compete on GPUs specifically; Amazon is usually not the cheapest here. Back to the Office and the office-supply channel occasionally list cards at trade pricing that undercuts everyone — that's where some of the biggest gaps on this site have appeared.

Brand partner

An RTX 5070 from ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte or Zotac is the same chip. The price difference is the cooler, the factory overclock (marginal), and the warranty. Buy the cheapest from a partner with a UK returns process. Don't pay £60 more for a name.

What to avoid

Cards listed by marketplace sellers with no UK address; "open box" without a stated condition; and any listing where the price is far below the rest of the market, which is either a mis-listed variant or a scam. The comparison on our deal pages is against the same model code on Amazon UK, which catches most of this.