It's great. Once ethereum etc. crash we can buy used high end graphic cards cheap.
You really want to buy a card a miner has pushed hard for weeks and months on end with who-knows-what cooling?
Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy
11–20 of 219 posts
Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy
#12It'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.
My local Microcenter has an open-box 1070 they want $800 for, an open-box 1060 3 GB they want $475 for, a couple new 1060 6 GBs they want $600 for, and a couple 1050 Tis they want $350 for. That's their entire stock apart from some misc GTS cards from like 10 years ago.
So yeah, they're marking everything up to double MSRP basically.
Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy
#13It's great. Once ethereum etc. crash we can buy used high end graphic cards cheap.
I’m not sure I’d want a card that’s been at full utilization, 24 hours a day, for who knows how long.
Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy
#14Bought some cards during the Christmas break season and prices/availability were fine. I was surprised when I went to buy some more and saw the prices! I reason that if crypto currenices crash I can re-purpose my nice new collection of GPU's to do Deep Learning training. It's got me pondering how one could do a distributed deep-learning training as the proof-of-work for a crypto-currency. Then the POW would be doing useful work anyways!
Along with causing issues with GPU card supplies there's been a lot of articles talking about how crypto-mining wastes electricity and hurts the environment. That's not necessarily the case across the board. Instead of running an electric heater this winter I am running a few GPU miners which produce a decent amount of heat. That helps me get a two-for-one benefit for ~9 months of the year since it's relatively chilly here year around. Might not work in all climates, but in many places its nice way to produce heat that'd just be waste heat anyways.
Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy
#15I'm legitimately worried about the long term future of my hobby (PC gaming) at this point.
Prices like this have a cascade effect because when less people can afford to build a PC and/or upgrade there's less incentive for developers and publishers to spend time on the platform. Consoles are shielded by the ability of Sony and Microsoft to take losses which will be absorbed by online fees and higher game prices but no such cushion exists for PCs (this is a strength to be sure, but a double edged sword in this respect).
PC gamers have spent years disproving the image of PCs as prohibitively expensive and now it's coming crashing down due to people in a faux gold rush wasting hardware and energy. I wish it would stop, but I don't know how much of the damage to the hobby can be repaired.
Of course there are other factors. Machine learning is eating up cards, smartphones and tablets are eating RAM, and I don't doubt there's price fixing. But ML is at least useful to humanity (sometimes), smartphones and tablets are tangible products, and price fixing can be investigated and punished.
I'm relatively shielded from this as I just built a high end machine (i7-7700, 1080ti, 32GB DDR4) that will last a while but the next time I want to build a machine might be painful. While I would probably pay the price, others will not, and the hobby will suffer.
Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy
#16Isn't this a pricing problem then?
Not really; if NVidia set their MSRP to $1,000 then gamers would still complain.
Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy
#17Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy
#18In 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.
Only if the folks providing the cards decide that it is worth investing in having a larger pipeline of production. If they feel the volatility might be too great... they may choose not to.
Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy
#19Its 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 wi…
ASICs aren't saving the planet either - people are incentivized to burn up to $BLOCK_REWARD of electricity per block, the number of hashes it takes to do so is irrelevant. If you come up with a better ASIC, people will buy more of them, the network difficulty increases, and you're back where you started. It's just another stage in the Red Queen's Race.
The only thing ASICs do is centralize control (because economies of scale favor companies who can produce+operate their own chips). Full stop.
Proof of stake doesn't actually work either, or at least not without a centralized master key to prevent stake grinding/rewriting history (at which point why have staking in the first place). And in many cases, it may devolve to proof of work anyway.
There is no efficient cryptocurrency, and the cat's out of the bag now, there is nothing that can (practically) be done to stop it. Apart from charging people exponentially-increasing rates on their utility bills, that is, but China isn't going to do that, so the planet is just going to have to take another one for the team.
Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy
#20Maybe there's something I missed about GPUs and mining, but how can an amateur rig like these hope to keep up with ASIC rigs? Can you profitably mine with residential electricity and GPUs still? How long can that possibly last?