Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/27/why-video-cards-are-so-expensive-right-now.html
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This must have changed fairly quickly. I had the local Microcenter build a new pc for me in October, and at that time there was still a fairly good selection of cards except for the newest NVidia cards. Now there website shows much less in stock. Now glad I didn’t wait any longer.
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My old card had been dying for years (quite noisily) and I finally replaced it right before the big spike in demand.
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I bought a new desktop PC in November, about a month after the 3080s came out. At that point, the wait for a 3080 was over four weeks. Folks on the builder’s Reddit were irate. Guess it’s only gotten worse since.
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I’ve been in the market for a new card for a few months and decided to wait until AMD released their 6000 series in Oct/Nov. Looks like I’m gonna be waiting a while longer.
Presumably another reason for the shortage is the launch of the latest consoles?
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No one mines bitcoin on GPUs. That hasn’t been profitable for years. Supply is simply constrained as TSMC is making the chips for everything right now. Apple phones, Android phones, AMD GPUs, Nvidia GPUs, some Intel chips, etc. GPUs are huge chips and take a lot of manufacturing capacity.
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Just because it isn’t “profitable” doesn’t mean people aren’t doing it anyway. They aren’t mining directly but instead selling clock cycles to distributed miners. Think Folding@home but without the civic good.
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NiceHash.
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In the US, when lockdown restrictions were lighter, people were queuing around the block at electronics retailers
Um, what? At no point has this been not been recommended against.
And people wonder why America is doing so incredibly poorly. 420,000 dead, 4000 dying every day because of exactly this kind of behavior. Everyone thinking they’re special and the rules don’t apply to them. Risking other peoples’ lives so you can have a new graphics card?!?!
Stay. The fuck. Home.
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That’s some ugly early-2000’s box art.
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Actually Microcenter has them, but to fight scalpers, they’ll only sell you one if you buy it with a motherboard, case, etc. If you just try to buy the GPU, they’ll say it is out of stock.
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It might be in part to fight scalpers, but it’s probably also to increase their attachment rate. Those other components have a higher profit margin, where I am sure margins are low for graphics.cards. The items that get people in the door always have lower margins.
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Apparently the thing is certain other coins can be mined with GPUs. So people mine those and exchange them for bit coin.
It does seem to be a minor factor this go around. More that the expectation that mining would drive demand kicked off the scalpers and speculators.
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That ATI card brings back memories - I soooo wanted something like that back in the day.
In case you are curious - here’s how it stacks up against the latest cards. https://technical.city/en/video/Radeon-9800-XT-vs-GeForce-RTX-3070
I love this auto generated summary:
So, 9800 XT or RTX 3070?
Technical City couldn’t decide between ATI Radeon 9800 XT and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070. We’ve got no test results to judge.
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I expect if graphics cards are in short supply the profit margin on them has gone up. However the absolute profit of selling X+Y (where X is a graphics card in this case) is always higher then just selling X…unless of corse the profit on Y is somehow negative, and while I don’t have a high level of respect for MicroCenter, I do think they can avoid that error.
So it might be in part to fight scalpers, exactly as you said, but it results in higher profit to MicroCenter because they also profit on a motherboard, CPU, case, power supply, fan, case LEDs, water cooling system, and whatever else they make you buy in order to get the graphics card.
As long as demand for the bundle still outstrips supply they are making money (short term, long term people forced to buy extra may choose to not visit MicroCenter once they can find parts in stock elsewhere…but very few businesses care about long term)
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Yes, that’s how it’s done. And I think we agree that crypto mining isn’t the main problem this time around–like it was a few years ago before all the ASIC’s came out. Only a few currencies are profitible to mine on GPU or CPU anymore and that part of the market is much smaller than the dedicated ASIC miners.
The real problem here is just that we’re in the middle of a pandemic and everything is constrained, but TSMC is particularly constrained as everyone and their dog is using their 7nm and 5nm processes. Heck, even their older 28nm processes are still popular.
@jlw yeah, that’s what I used back when I was mining.
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