Wtf graphics card prices?

Technology
#1

anyone else following this? thanks to them being bought up in bulk by various folks doing crypto bullshit, gpu prices are a bit mental. Apparently i could buy another of my existing GPU (that i believe i spent £659 on some 8-9 months ago) for a meagre £850?!? Sorry whut?

Here’s hoping the bottom falls out of a bunch of them and the market gets flooded with second hand cheap GPUs (because when it happens it might kill the market for buying new and curb the ever increasing price points).

Anyone else checked out what profit they could make by selling their GPU? It seems to be affecting mid-range cards as well as the upper end.

#2

Sadly my lowly GTX770 isn’t worth all that much, but I’ve been looking at upgrading and everything is so stupidly expensive that I’ve got absolutely zero chance of that. Cheers Crypto!

It’s an utter joke on the prices right now tbh. It’s essentially pushing casual gamers out of the upgrade market.

#3

it’s sent the current 2nd hand market to the deep end too as a result; sucks that you’re looking to buy :confused:

it may push folks on to a console; as you could sell your GPU, get a low end placeholder so the machine runs, and get a console, controllers, games etc with the profit.

I’d like to think we might see some devs try to optimise their stuff a bit better, but that’s probably wishful thinking.

#4

Tl;dr

Bitcoin

There is a better article I’ve seen on reddit but can’t seem to find now, I’ll post it if I find it.

#5

Yep its all gone mad. We cant get them from ASUS atm as they are all sold out to big companies who buy them all up in bulk. And even if we do then they all go out to 1 or 2 of our big customers.

#6

Just had a check on the price of my MSi GTX 1070 Gaming X, bought it in September 2016 @ £419.99. Today it’ll cos you £549.98 & that’s pre-order too :confused:

#7

I had been eyeing up the 1080Ti (I know Adrock, I was too slow before) and now the prices are just prohibitively expenseive :confused:

#8

Wasn’t their something about the tsunami that hit Japan ruining a big stock of 3d cards? Or the company that make the chips
That might of had a knock on effect to the prices?

#9

not sure about tsunamis there buggsy but basically the cryptocurrency market is going into full industrialisation. Whole buildings being rented out to farm these fuckers that have no consequence on the real world, a dot.com esque bubble.

This one is killing the GPU market bad. Thing is the manufacturers can’t risk ramping up production without risking collapsing should the market buckle, which is very likely considering the stability of these currencies.

#10

Bitcoin moved to ASIC’s years ago its all the new crypto currencies that are driving this insanity.

I read recently that Nvidia asked stores to prioritise sales to people only wanting one or two card and not literally 10+ at a time.

The shops and the GPU manufacturers still win since they don’t really care what the cards end up being used for!

You can buy “mining” cards which don’t feature display outputs for a bit less than a gaming card but most miners aren’t going to buy those since they cant stick those on ebay to sell to gamers when their crypto bubble bursts!

Basically people who want to use the GPU’s for what they were designed for, gaming, lose!

I have read some discussion about possibly nerfing the compute performance, used by the crypto mining software, in the drivers but this will just be something the miners would circumvent so neither AMD or Nvidia would take the time to do that.

#11

I’m super happy I still got my 1060 6GB and 1080Ti when they were half way reasonable. Now its litteraly insane, not just GPUs but Ram also skyrocketed over the last year. When the bubble bursts and everyone cries, they will cry double as the GPU price market will drop like crazy ove rthe first month as the demand won’t have changed much but massive amounts of 1060s, 1070s, 480s and 570s will flood the market.

#12

@NaloaC , you could buy sandys’ 1080Ti on bit-tech, he’s selling one with a dodgy hdmi port for £700; i knows you got dem displayports :wink:

Aye, they can’t ramp up production i guess, or the huge second hand flood would kill the market for expensive incremental upgrades. I’m glad I didn’t hold out longer, i can hopefully sit on this until the issue resolves itself. Shame i didn’t get more ram earlier though :frowning:

1 Like
#13

There were some issues with supply of certain components a few years ago because of adverse weather where a lot of factories were based. This contributed to spikes in cost of RAM and SSDs for a time.

Not sure if its still having an impact though.

1 Like
#14

ssds haven’t come back down. my 750GB cost me £105 :confused:

#15

The RAM and NAND flash prices have gone up mainly due to supply and demand.

More and more mobile devices are using DDR4 RAM and obviously gobble up a lot of the NAND flash chips too.

I’d say the big RAM manufacturers are churning out DDR4 in the tiny BGA packages used in phones and producing less in the form that servers and PC’s use.

#16

So Samsung might be the ones to burst the GPU bubble with a range of mining chips…

#17

It’ll be interesting to see what happens for sure but some of the other crypto currencies are “ASIC proof” which I think just relates to the amount of memory required for the algorithms to work but its only a matter of time until someone figures out how to make an ASIC for the current popular crypto coins.

That article brings back memories of when I used to run my old asic for bitcoin mining as I have one of those asic miners pictured, its an antminer S1 but I turned mine off years ago! I had fun dabbling at the time and even modified my miner to be more power efficent and added extra heatsinking to help it cool.

Anyone got a time machine so I can go back and buy a decent GPU and some DDR4 RAM for a non silly price? :slight_smile:

#18

I think an almost better way to make money would have been buying lots of mid range gpus before the big Bitcoin crazyness and just sell them now. Even 570 & 580s which almost no one bought for gaming are sold out. You could easily make 200-300 bucks plus on a 1060 or 1070, similar for the 570s.

Funny enough, South Korea also wants to follow Chinas lead to ban Crypto farming…

#19

For the completely clueless i.e. me.

#20

I would love to get into Crypto-mining… but I feel that ship has well and truly sailed. Anything up and coming that I read about (like new currencies etc) just screams the words “THIS IS A SCAM” that could lose you a lot of money.

If there is money to be made and/or mined from Crypto, then large corporations will have the infrastructure and capital to do it… and not the little guy like it used to be. Money makes money.