Originally published at: The graphics card sadness index | Boing Boing
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Been thinking about getting a new card, but I’ve come to the conclusion it would be about the same price just to buy a whole new system with the video card I want. Plus no waiting since the system manufacturers buy their cards direct.
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I did find a 3070 in stock the other day!
But it was going for £1200 when the original RRP was ~£500. Yeah, nah…
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My 13 year old was excited to build his first pc a few months back… And I was excited for him to do it… But he wound up settling for a graphics card that was pretty much the same one that was in the laptop he was replacing and we were lucky to get that.
At least he hasn’t mentioned camping out at the microcenter in a few weeks…
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Whhhy this bizarre situation has gone on sufficiently long that it fairly gives pause (or paws) to one’s faith in the invisible hand of the market – it does. Where, oh where, is the supply to meet with this demand? (“uhm… China tariffs? anticipated future release of Call of Duty? selling Elon Musks shorts short?”)
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Back in October I got an RX 5700 XT from Microcenter, figuring it would be some time before they had sufficient inventory on the newer cards. Now I’m glad I didn’t wait any longer!
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So when are graphics card producers just going to stop selling cards and just mine bitcoin themselves 100% of the time?
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Sticking with my GTX 960, since there’s no point in spending inflated prices for a graphics card when I have one that’s perfectly functional.
One of the other unfortunate side effects of this problem is that Nvidia is deliberately crippling 3060s to discourage miners. I’m wondering how that might affect other applications that are neither mining nor gaming. If they’re going to decide what I’m allowed to run, the answer is NO.
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Similar! In November my 13 yo daughter built her own rig for one of her classes. We opted for an Nvidia 1660 Super, which she got for $265 from BestBuy. Same card at BestBuy today is priced at $380, but is also sold out. Looks like you can get it through NewEgg for $780? Bonkers.
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I wonder the same thing sometimes. But they’re selling shovels in a gold rush. If they know what’s good for them, they’ll ride it out. Probably best not even to scale up production to meet this temporary demand. This represents a major influx of competitors to the crypto-mining market, which means it won’t be worth the investment for much longer.
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Because there’s a lot more money to be made selling graphics cards. Mining cryptocurrency is a pointless way to spend electricity at this point.
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I figure there must be some economic tipping point though.
There are a lot of unsaid assumptions in my brief statement.
Maybe, but the value of mining is going down, not up. The price of existing crypto rises slower than the cost of mining is rising. That’s why Goldman Sachs is trading it, not mining it.
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We lucked out and jumped on a good price for a 1060 on ebay. He’s still ecstatic with his machine. Everything else is way better than the laptop and it’s got enough fans and leds to satisfy a teenager…
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I’ve been working with a pair of gtx970s for 5+ years now… I considered the 20 series, but decided to wait for the 30 series… Big mistake… I don’t think there’s a single 30 card in-stock in Canada. I don’t even play games… purely for work… I was reading that the new gtx 3060 has some anti-mining features to support non-miners, but it’s sold out everywhere too and I’m not sure if the nerfing would also impact GPU rending.
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This is what I did last week. In November, I had a list ready to go of parts to purchase to build a new machine, but kept delaying the purchases because the video card was always unavailable or too expensive from scalpers.
I ended up just finding a prebuilt with the video card I wanted.
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Heavily constrained by COVID driven component shortages and shipping delays.
While everyone is at home, bored, driving record demand.
The run up on prices started before crypto set off and there’s not a ton of evidence that mining is what’s driving prices up.
Apparently it doesn’t. The way they’re doing it is by having the drivers recognize typical mining tasks and tanking specific functions. Seems like it’s only happening with the gaming cards/drivers that don’t use the same bits or do the same math.
I doubt it’ll work in the end seems like the sort of thing nerds will work around pretty quickly.
They’re both working on ramping production. The higher demand predates the mining spike, and actually predates the pandemic. These things have been hard to get since the day they released. And recent processors have been seeing the same shortages and price gouging, despite not being the thing you grab up for mining. The previous generation of parts saw similar, if less extreme impacts from the start of the pandemic. Newly released consoles are seeing neary identical shortages and gouging.
There’s an overall shortage of integrated circuits right now. With even automakers cutting production because they can’t get the sort of chips they need.
I don’t think you can peg this on mining. I’m sure it’s not helping, but no one is building mining rigs from emissions chips, OEM only laptop processors and PS4s.
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Can you explain, such that an english-major dropout can understand, why graphics processors are better for crypto mining than straight-up CPUs?
I’m probably not the best person to ask in that front. I’m not sure I get enough of the technicals on how “compute” with GPUs works.
But it boils down to the GPUs do it faster and cost less to run, because they’re built around the same sort of operations that cryptos like bitcoin rely on.
The sort of thing where having a thousand cores that are very efficient at doing that one thing, beats out a few much more powerful cores that are pretty good at everything.
It’s made GPUs the default approach for a lot of non-graphics computational work. Shit like AI, and burning through data for various kinds of research.
Bitcoin was built to take advantage of that, other GPU minable currencies followed suit.
Where it impacts us is that cryptos tend to need the sort of math consumer GPUs are built for. But benefit less from the extra compute specific stuff in very expensive professional cards.
Consumer gaming GPUs become a cost effective way to load up a bunch of mining power.
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Nah, they will just sell graphics cards that can’t do graphics.
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