Slashdot Mirror
GPU Prices Are Falling (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: If you were looking for a new graphics card for your PC over the last year, your search probably ended with you giving up and slinging some cusses at cryptocurrency miners. But now the supply of video cards is on the verge of rebounding, and I don't think you should wait much longer to pull the trigger on a purchase. Earlier this week, Digitimes reported that GPU vendors like Gigabyte, MSI, and others were expecting to see their card shipments plummet 40 percent month-over-month. The market for digital currencies like Bitcoin and Etherum is losing some of its momentum, and at the same time, large mining operations are pulling back on their investment in GPUs in anticipation of dedicated mining rigs (called ASICs) that are due out before the end of the year. These factors working in conjunction seem like they are leading to more supply, which in turn is forcing retailers to cut prices. For example, the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 video card is selling on Amazon right now for $700. Other retailers even have it listed at the original MSRP of $600. These are the lowest prices of 2018 so far.
Better, when will the big operations start dumping cards by the thousands onto Ebay? A plentiful secondhand market + crypto not buying new cards should deepen the effect. I'm fine with used stuff, but do wonder how much life a GPU that has run flat-out 24/7 for a year or two has left.
The top-end cards became halo products. Just like few cars on the road are Mustangs, few video cards are 1080 Tis.
Checking the Steam Hardware Survey, about 60% of all cards are Nvidia GeForces in the xx50 to xx70 range - the normal, reasonably-priced cards. (AMD is only 10% of the market right now, with much of that being integrated. Their fundamental architecture was just way better-suited for mining, so their prices spiked even harder than Nvidia's did.)
Also, be aware the GF1xxx series MSRPs were already inflated by mining demand. The "normal" price for a top-end xx80 Ti is $500-$600, and the only-slightly-slower xx80 is usually $350-$400. But the 9xx series was already selling for nearly double MSRP when the 10xx series came out, they'd have been idiots to not bump up the stock prices.
Maybe because gamers are budget constrained. If I have 300$, I can't buy a 500$ card that will run my games the way I want, since the original 300$ MSRP is inflated due to demand. Because I can't buy that card in the first place, I can't mine with it. Or, I happen to not live in one of the areas where the power costs make that break even. Perhaps my computer can't be left on at night because the fans/lights keep me awake.
I don't like miners because they are mostly wasting a shit-load of electricity, stealing CPU cycles, or hardware, driving up prices of anything with graphics hardware (GDDR and generic DRAM shortages), and functioning as essentially a high-tech form of scrip, or perhaps monopoly money, with little to nothing backing it (See the open question about if tether actually has the cash to back their tokens that they claim to, since they printed a few hundred million since declaring their bank transfers in and out had been blocked, or perhaps any of the other scams, like Bitconnect, or Pincoin). The vast majority of the "Value" of these currencies is in coins that have never been traded for cash, many of which are out of circulation. Thus the fantastic value numbers are more representative of the last few dozen coins trading price multiplied by the total sum of coins. Logically, because the exchanges never took in sums in the billions of dollars, they can't pay it out. So it's all an illusion of worth, even more so than fiat currency or a standard bank account, because you can't pay nearly as many vendors with it, so it's utility is less, especially since most people don't understand that they are pseudonymous systems, rather than complete anonymous setups. Even the big names in privacy, like Monero, have had it breached. Most are less private than a credit card, because those at least are bound not to release all your info to anyone who calls to ask.