A hot potato: The runup to last year'southward holiday season shone a spotlight on scalping similar never earlier. Everything from the new generation of consoles, to graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia, to the Ryzen 5000 processors were (and yet are) disappearing as soon equally they went on sale and landing on eBay for obscene prices. In the instance of AMD's latest CPUs, scalpers take made well-nigh one million dollars in profit.

The revelation comes from Michael Driscoll, whose information-scraping scripts previously showed how scalpers generated nearly $forty million in turn a profit from the newest tech products during the last holiday flavour. He's now providing an update on how these goods' eBay prices have changed over the terminal month, starting with the Zen 3 processors.

Summarizing, Driscoll writes that viii,720 Ryzen 5000 CPUs have been sold on eBay. That works out at $5.88 million in sales, with scalpers walking abroad with $946,000 in turn a profit. Sellers weren't the only ones to benefit; eBay and PayPal made $625,665 from the transactions.

Looking at individual processors, the Ryzen 5 5600X was the most pop with 3,204 units sold at a median price of $405—the CPU has a $299 MSRP. Meanwhile, the flagship Ryzen 9 5950X has a median price of $1,187 (MSRP $799) with 1,437 units sold.

A depressingly familiar sight

Zen 3 prices on eBay take stabilized over the last calendar month at 25 – 40 percent over MSRP. In mid-November, the Ryzen 9 5950X was going for 240 percentage of its recommended cost. Now, it'southward around 40 percent more than ($ane,187).

Driscoll also examined Zen 3 sales on StockX, which takes a 3 percentage cut of selling fees, ten pct less than eBay'southward share. The more generous terms for sellers are likely factors behind the processors' lower prices on the platform (beneath).

StockX prices

If you lot're hoping to buy a Zen 3 processor from an official retailer anytime soon, don't hold your breath. AMD recently said supply of its CPUs and GPUs would be tight during the showtime one-half of 2022.