2021 is truly the best year to upgrade your GPU

[Rumpy]

They might not care, but the end-users who are desperately trying to obtain cards certainly do. You can't alienate your core market and expect sunshine all the while pretending nothing's changed. The benefit might be short-lived but have long-term consequences.

But I rest my case, I guess prices are better if they're higher...

[Carpet_pissr]

Core market has shifted away from retail single purchase boxes.

[Zarathud]

Gave up on ordering a custom built gaming rig. The local Microcenter has some NVIDIA RTX 3070 periodically in their house PowerSpec brand. The case is a cheaper LianLi 205 rather than the 4000D or LianCool II I wanted but the rest of the parts should be ok even though it's a MSI rather than ASUS motherboard. I'm most likely to have to replace the case fans.

[Blackhawk]

In regards to locking the 3060 against mining and releasing a dedicated mining card, the buzz I'm hearing is that A) the lock does nothing, as it is at the driver level and will be reverse engineered on day 1, so it is mostly for press. B) the new card has nothing to do with making gamers happy or increasing supply (the supply shortage is silicon, not manufactured cards.) When new cards get released, miners upgrade, and their used cards flood the secondary market, which gamers snap up instead of buying new cards, always running the top card of the previous generation instead of a lower card of the current generation (the GTX 1080 is faster than the RTX 2060, and the 3060 'locked' card is slower than the 2080/2090s miners are using now.) With the dedicated mining card, Nvidia is mostly acting to eliminate the secondary market when their next generation hits, as nobody is going to buy used mining-only cards.

So they've done nothing but take away a cheap avenue for cards and give themselves a PR boost.

[Daehawk]

Id never buy a known used mining card.

[Rumpy]

In regards to locking the 3060 against mining and releasing a dedicated mining card, the buzz I'm hearing is that A) the lock does nothing, as it is at the driver level and will be reverse engineered on day 1, so it is mostly for press

They've explained that it's at the card's Bios level, with the software talking to the hardware level using a handshake, which would be hard to reverse engineer unless they were to completely rewrite the Bios to fool the software.

[Kraken]

I REALLY hope that crypto-mining from home computers dies a fast, hard death....and soon. I know that Nvidia and AMD sell in bulk directly to "mining farms", which is not helping, either.

IDK anything about that, but having edited >800 GTC 2021 session descriptions for NVIDIA (and still counting), I can tell you that there's insane demand for their GPUs in AI deployment. From automotive to healthcare to supply chain to oil&gas to XR developers, everyone's buying GPUs right now.

[Daehawk]

Zotac enrages gamers with tweet celebrating crypto mining

Boy did they shoot themselves are what?

[Carpet_pissr]

Again, probably not! Mining is a golden goose for these companies.

[coopasonic]

I decided the best way to get an upgraded GPU is a new PC and my youngest needs an upgrade (hand me down)... best I could find was cyberpowerPC saying they could get me a system with a 3080 in six weeks. I couldn't find any PC builder that could fulfill my wish, though 1 or 2 offered 3090s for an extra $2k.

[Zarathud]

I picked up my new PC from Microcenter. I trolled the website daily for about a week until they had the CPU/GPU specs I wanted in stock. The LianLi cases are smallish, but I think it would work well if you cannibalized the system for a kid PC.

[coopasonic]

I picked up my new PC from Microcenter. I trolled the website daily for about a week until they had the CPU/GPU specs I wanted in stock. The LianLi cases are smallish, but I think it would work well if you cannibalized the system for a kid PC.

Dammit man, you made me look. They had a pile of the 3070 system in stock and then this morning they had ONE with a 3080... I went back and forth a bit but ended up reserving it.

[Zarathud]

I almost picked up the 3080 system but missed clicking immediately.

Think of it this way, you have a system’s worth of parts for the price of a scalped video card and the mobo+CPU.

I’d have loved to pick my own parts for a Lian-Li 4000D from Digital Storm, but I didn’t have 2+ months. My firm is rolling out new networking protocols and I needed to be on a fresh install of Windows 10 stating March 1.

[Blackhawk]

A look at some of the factors involved. WaPo link, may or may not be paywalled.

[Archinerd]

This one is for all my friends here still rocking with the old GTX 970 (I'm also in that club).

From Tom's Hardware; 2014-Era GTX 970 Emerges as Value GPU on eBay During Shortage.

Based on the performance we measured in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, and combined with current (the past week) eBay prices, we generated an FPS-to-dollar metric to see which cards might be worth considering. The winner, as you've no doubt guessed from the headline, was Nvidia's relatively ancient GTX 970 card from late 2014.

[hitbyambulance]

This one is for all my friends here still rocking with the old GTX 970 (I'm also in that club).

From Tom's Hardware; 2014-Era GTX 970 Emerges as Value GPU on eBay During Shortage.

Based on the performance we measured in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, and combined with current (the past week) eBay prices, we generated an FPS-to-dollar metric to see which cards might be worth considering. The winner, as you've no doubt guessed from the headline, was Nvidia's relatively ancient GTX 970 card from late 2014.

i'm now kinda tempted to sell mine (for twice what i paid for it) and install this old Radeon HD 4870. i'm not playing anything graphically intensive right at the moment...

[Chraolic]

This one is for all my friends here still rocking with the old GTX 970 (I'm also in that club).

Same. I'd love to get a 3070, but $1250 for a mid-level card is way too bananas for me. Hell, my entire system with an I7-4790, 16 GB RAM, GTX 970 and 500 GB SSD cost about $1600 back in 2015.