Octopus Overlords

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...

Core market has shifted away from retail single purchase boxes.

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.

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.

Id never buy a known used mining card.

Blackhawk wrote: ↑Sun Feb 21, 2021 1:49 pm 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.

Carpet_pissr wrote: ↑Wed Feb 17, 2021 3:38 pm 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.

Zotac enrages gamers with tweet celebrating crypto mining

Boy did they shoot themselves are what?

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

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.

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.

Zarathud wrote: ↑Thu Feb 25, 2021 12:45 am 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.

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.

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

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.

Archinerd wrote: ↑Tue Mar 02, 2021 5:43 pm 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...

Archinerd wrote: ↑Tue Mar 02, 2021 5:43 pm 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.

jztemple2 wrote: ↑Thu Feb 18, 2021 2:51 pm Interesting article from PCGamesN, Nvidia nerfs RTX 3060 against mining, says “GeForce is made for gaming”

And new beta drivers remove the limit.

Hey, they made it almost a month!

Nvidia removes mining rate limits on the GeForce RTX 3060 with a new beta driver

Well that didn't last long.

An hour left to enter the Newegg Shuffle this afternoon including options for a PS5 or an RTX 3090 for a mere $1900.

https://www.newegg.com/product-shuffle

People stand in a virtual line to get ripped off?

Daehawk wrote: ↑Mon Mar 15, 2021 3:51 pm People stand in a virtual line to get ripped off?

If you can find a cheaper 3090 than that, you should definitely buy it. Second-hand prices are about $2900.

Has there been any official industry update regarding the GPU issue? I was looking yesterday (just window shopping) and saw a refurb 2080 unit on Amazon for $2K. That seems...insane.

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Wed Mar 17, 2021 2:47 pm Has there been any official industry update regarding the GPU issue? I was looking yesterday (just window shopping) and saw a refurb 2080 unit on Amazon for $2K. That seems...insane.

Was it a 3rd party seller? Plenty of scalpers on Amazon but that doesn't necessarily represent the going rate.

It's something I've had in my wishlist since the Fall of 2020 - just watching trending. The other machines I'd wishlisted around Xmas (30XX-based) are all unavailable. They're being sold by reputable vendors, not scalpers, afaik. That same refurb 2080-based system was around $1200 back in the Fall, if I'm remembering correctly.

Yeah, I broke down today and ordered a brand new system since components are constantly out of stock, the second-hand market is utterly insane and I'm getting tired of waiting forever just to be able to upgrade. Ended up with a Ryzen 5 5600X with a GTX 3070, 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD priced at nearly €2000, which isn't a great price but it's probably about the best offer there's going to be for a while.

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Wed Mar 17, 2021 2:52 pm It's something I've had in my wishlist since the Fall of 2020 - just watching trending. The other machines I'd wishlisted around Xmas (30XX-based) are all unavailable. They're being sold by reputable vendors, not scalpers, afaik. That same refurb 2080-based system was around $1200 back in the Fall, if I'm remembering correctly.

Did they stop making 2080s? Price charts have no volume after Jan when the 30xxs start moving.




Newegg has a new unit for just under $1,900. Seems in line with the card drought.

not going to pay inflated prices - will keep the current GPU until some sort of market correction happens. it's just a video card, it's not that urgent to replace.

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Wed Mar 17, 2021 2:47 pm Has there been any official industry update regarding the GPU issue? I was looking yesterday (just window shopping) and saw a refurb 2080 unit on Amazon for $2K. That seems...insane.

It's a global semiconductor issue now, and has spilled into auto manufacturing, with GM and several other majors literally mothballing entire plants since they can't get any chips that go into the cars. Crazy.

Forecasts are for things to loosen up at the end of this year, but it will take a while for all that pent up demand from business AND retail to get processed I guess. For those of us interested in buying JUST an above average graphics card (without paying absurd prices)? I bet it will be early next year or later even.

hitbyambulance wrote: ↑Wed Mar 17, 2021 6:18 pm not going to pay inflated prices - will keep the current GPU until some sort of market correction happens. it's just a video card, it's not that urgent to replace.

Unless you're dying to play Cyberpunk on a PC.
Or you want your kid to stop bugging you about playing Minecraft with raytracing. And while I wouldn't mind seeing that myself, I sure don't want to pay 18 FREAKING hundred dollars to do so.

Right now I'm just looking for something, anything, that's equivalent or better than a 980ti.

Currently, my existing 980ti is doing just fine and can handle everything I'm playing but I desperately need to replace the 680 that's in the wife's gaming machine as she is relegated to playing Red Dead II in windowed mode on medium settings.

The plan when I built my new machine was to put something from the 30xx series into it and she would inherit my 980 but since any new cards are either impossible to get or are prohibitively expensive, she's been forced to make due with that salvaged 680.

Carpet_pissr wrote: ↑Wed Mar 17, 2021 10:46 pm It's a global semiconductor issue now, and has spilled into auto manufacturing, with GM and several other majors literally mothballing entire plants since they can't get any chips that go into the cars. Crazy.

Ok, see that I didn't know. Just need to hope my 4+ year old PC doesn't give up the ghost any time soon.

The timing was great two years ago when my video card died and my sister surprised me with an RTX 2060. It's not the fastest card (it's slower than the higher 10XX series cards), but it's enough to at least run anything that's out, although high-end stuff (Cyberpunk, some VR games, etc) requires some flexibility in regards to quality vs performance.

Big article on Vox about the semiconductor shortage and how it's rippled out into everything.

But boosting tech manufacturing in the US isn’t as simple as spending billions of dollars, canceling contracts around the world, ditching the global suppliers, and suddenly having a bunch of new jobs available to US workers.

“Before you blow up the old bridge, make sure you build a new bridge,” Tang said. “Make sure the new bridge is tested, and keep the old bridge running.”

Digital Storm finally got their gaming laptops back in stock, even with the 3080 option - but the prices went up about $500.

i'm very glad I didn't wait to get the 2070 super when I did. I was considering waiting for the next gen but sheesh that would have been costly.

I can honestly wait a while to upgrade again. It'll give me time to save up. My real fear is what I'll do if one of the video cards in the house fails. There aren't any replacements to be had for the kind of money I could afford to spend.

RMAed my RTX 2060 6GB yesterday after I couldn't get my machine past the BIOS select screen, and reinstalled my R9 390. After an evening of spurious reboots (Chrome being too much of a load if I already had Discord and PokerStars open along with driving two monitors), I recall why I purchased the nVidia card in November 2019. Hopefully the repair process goes quickly, as I don't think I can live with one scaled down monitor and babysitting my GPU temps for the six weeks they anticipate it'll take for my repair...

I'd probably save money by purchasing a 1060 Ti 3GB (just $500, used!) if only because this Radeon I'm currently running pulls something insane like 300W. Of course, the turn-around time on one of those cards is also measured in weeks, so maybe I just turn off the PC until June.

That sounds...not great. I wonder if I should just accept that a 20xx card is going to be better than what I'm rolling with now? I'm always of the mind that upgrading a computer voluntarily is better than replacing one in an emergency....

I'd seen that Cyberpower had a 20xx Intel system coming back in stock.