Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy
arstechnica.com
Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy
1–10 of 219 posts
Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy
#2Isn't this a pricing problem then?
Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy
#3In the long run, explosion in demand for GPUs will help lower prices and push the technical envelope for enveryone, including the gamers complaining in this article.
Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy
#4It's (unsurprisingly) pushing the used market up. I'm selling a 1070 I don't need anymore, and it's already at more than I originally paid for it, despite being over a year old at this point.
Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy
#5In the long run, explosion in demand for GPUs will help lower prices and push the technical envelope for enveryone, including the gamers complaining in this article.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Increased demand for RAM due to smartphones usage has led the prices upwards, not downwards.
Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy
#6In the long run, explosion in demand for GPUs will help lower prices and push the technical envelope for enveryone, including the gamers complaining in this article.
I think that's only likely if the demand is sustained though another development cycle / generation of GPU products, though. If demand collapses soon, it'll just be yet another story about how the market was really weird for a bit.
Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy
#7Sell pickaxes (during a gold rush).
Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy
#8The shortage is not entirely because of miners. Nvidia manufacturers switched to using slower RAM in some of their cards. This was actually a very smart move (they should expand it to all their cards IMO). If you want the fast RAM, you have to buy the "mining" version of the cards. So in theory, it should have no impact on the gaming market.
For some of the popular mining cards (e.g. RX 470/80), well they simply haven't been available in many places for over a year now. Their successors aren't that great for mining either because of the increased power usage and RAM "lottery" (you don't really know what type of RAM you're getting when you buy a card). But most gamers don't generally care about RAM speed. This is also why the 5 series is generally cheaper than the 4 series (where you can find them).
However, the biggest problem is that there simply isn't enough RAM. The RAM shortage is being driven by smart phone and GPU production, and suspected price fixing. Samsung said they plan on increasing production (apparently they don't like it their competitors who make inferior RAM are making similar profits), but we will probably only see the effect mid-2018.
https://www.dramexchange.com/WeeklyResearch/Post/2/4815.html
http://www.pcgamer.com/samsung-to-increase-dram-output-as-ra...
Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy
#9Its bad. Its never been this bad before. Just go on pcpartspicker and realize that there are GTX 1080 Tis selling on third party websites for over $1500, and that's the only place you can get them beyond getting lucky.
Nvidia isn't going to ramp up production significantly because crypto could crash any day, simultaneously destroying their new sales and flooding the used market with old mining hardware. Combine it with the industry-wide RAM shortage... What a disaster.
The funny thing is, I remember back when ASICs first started coming out for Bitcoin, and a whole bunch of new cryptos came out saying "we're specifically designed to thwart ASICs so everyone can mine on the cards they have!" Well, here's what you've created. No one can afford cards anymore, and you made making more efficient hardware harder. Thanks for destroying the planet.
Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy
#10It's great. Once ethereum etc. crash we can buy used high end graphic cards cheap.