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GPU Hoarding: ‘I Felt Like I Was Buying Drugs’
- mrguyorama 9y agoI feel incredibly lucky. In late November (IIRC), I was mulling over whether I should upgrade from an R9 270 to a better card that could manage VR someday. I sat on the thought for a week, unwanting to buy a graphics card at above MSRP. I finally pulled the trigger, as gaming is something I do a huge amount of, and I have disposable income that I really need to learn to not be so stingy with. As of today, the card I bought costs over $720[0]. I paid just over $300 [0]: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6V66483925&cm_re=rx_580-_-14-137-117-_-Product https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6V66483...
- foota 9y agoI got a fury X for a couple hundred dollars before all this nonsense started, I was similarly happy with my decision. edit: or incredulous at how much they cost now
- paulmd 9y agoA lot of those third-party listings are way high, just on the off case that somebody impulse-buys them or blindly follows some internet guide/link. On eBay, 580s are going for about $350 at the moment. Still more than double what they were going for a year ago, you used to be able to reliably get the 8 GB for $175, but it's not $720 either. That's 1080 money.
- uptown 9y agoBypass: https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fthe-computer-part-people-are-hoarding-i-felt-like-i-was-buying-drugs-1518195876&h=ATOxuGLly3XW9UkbDHjTREeY4xgy5HCOqVP_KWEzco2gpHwMCLo-bGoevuo3kjtmHu6Xy8zE_NSAjLKQWnjR4mc6YtGPhGk8b6l0RmOYTAvmU2vuVWOH3goHv6Y https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Fa...
- neonate 9y agohttp://archive.is/Z0q87 http://archive.is/Z0q87 works for me.
- tardygrad 9y agoBiggest takeaway for me is that the WSJ now uses Gawker level clickbait titles.
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- johnnyfived 9y agoYikes I know. What a juxtaposition between an "edgy" headline ("felt like I was buying drugs") and one of the most mundane opening sentences in journalism I've ever read ("James Liska finally spotted a reasonably priced computer-graphics card online. By the time he clicked “buy,” it was gone.").
- Y_Y 9y agoI wonder if someone can write a script so that the submission form can automatically block titles like "The Weird Old Foo You Won't Believe is Bar!".
- Unkechaug 9y agoThe entire industry is going down that path because it's the best way to make money. The WSJ has been doing this for a few years now.
- paulgb 9y agoFWIW the A-Hed is meant to be a humorous column. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303362404575580494180594982 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303362404575580...
- Spooky23 9y agoThe WSJ is just another Fox outlet.
- seiferteric 9y agoI bought a GTX1080 founders edition a few weeks after it came out over a year ago, after I was finally able to find one at best buy (of all places). I felt bad for spending all that money. I am seeing now they are selling used on ebay for more than I bought it for new. I can't remember a time in computer history where this has happened.
- Declanomous 9y agoThat definitely happened with GPUs back when bitcoin could be mined with GPUs. That also has happened with RAM recently as well. Also, after a while certain enterprise hardware ends up being worth a fortune as desperate IT guys try to buy stuff as spares for a critical system that haven't been upgraded for whatever reason. Then there's stuff like Raspberry Pi's, though they aren't really a computer part per se. That being said, computer parts occasionally do sell used for more than their list price.
- alasdair_ 9y agoIt took me weeks of searching and refreshing newegg, amazon etc. just to buy a 16-port PoE unifi switch for a reasonable price recently. No idea why but apparently a lot of others had been having similar sourcing issues.
- paulmd 9y ago
- coralreef 9y agoI think this is a short term thing and will ease as GPU supply catches up and competition reduces profit margins. Right now from my calculations, a GPU is looking at something like 10 months until break even based on current crypto and GPU prices. That's not a great investment considering you could just trade cyrpto itself and be far more liquid.
- wyld_one 9y agoheh, when? by the time you will be able to get one they will have a new one out you can't get either. I thought I would be able to get two of the AMD vega 64 shortly after COMPDEX. Then I saw the prices. WHOOF. Availablity sucks, price sucks, and frankly I am still waiting.
- coralreef 9y agoAt my local store (Toronto) pretty much all the Nvidia models are in stock. Prices are high though. There is also stock available on the aftermarket, including whole rigs for sale.
- Animats 9y agoNVidia has announced they don't want to chase the mining market. They're worried that they'd build up capacity and the mining market would go bust.[1] But they may have to. High-end NVidia cards have doubled in price. The gaming industry is unhappy. Gamers are unhappy. NVidia is looking at a "mining version" of their next card so they can still sell to graphics users.[2] [1] https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/cryptocurrency-mining-graphics-card-prices/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/cryptocurrency-minin... [2] https://www.tweaktown.com/news/60839/nvidia-unveil-mining-specific-geforce-gtx-2080-cards/index.html https://www.tweaktown.com/news/60839/nvidia-unveil-mining-sp...
- mv4 9y agoNVIDIA may be publicly saying that, but I am sure they are absolutely thrilled with the way sales (and margins) have been growing. And it wasn't gaming, AI, or autonomous cars - it's mining. The gamer problem is exaggerated. While GPUs are definitely hard to buy in quantities > 1, and the prices are definitely much higher than 6 months ago - pre-built gaming machines (Alienware, Lenovo Cube, iBuyPower, etc) are still affordable. It's almost absurd seeing how these computers are now sold for less than the sum of the parts (especially the RAM and the GPU). So, one thing has definitely changed for gamers - it's actually much cheaper now to buy a whole gaming PC than to build one. So much so that "crypto enthusiasts" now buy these machines, swap out the GPUs for low-end versions, then put them on eBay.
- tormeh 9y agoThat's because system vendors have fixed-price contracts. Their prices just have time lag.
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- thrill 9y agoThe only computer parts I hoard are my Microsoft trackball and klackety keyboard.
- bitwize 9y agoOh, so the video card shortage is an actual thing and not something Micro Center sales staff ginned up in order to drive up prices. Which means I got an absolute steal on my recent PC build, all things considered.
- mv4 9y agoSensationalist title... but the article was a fun read nonetheless. For me, building mining rigs is a great way to teach my kids some DIY skills, electronics, thermodynamics, etc. I've basically been using these as space heaters throughout the house, in the tool shed, etc: https://www.alatortsev.com/2018/01/10/milk-crate-crypto-miner-aka-space-heater/ https://www.alatortsev.com/2018/01/10/milk-crate-crypto-mine... Now just need to figure out what to do with all the access heat in the summer. Might heat the swimming pool. :)
- paulmd 9y agoThe good news is Bitmain is rumored to be launching an Ethereum ASIC - 25x as fast as an RX 570 at 4x the efficiency (650 MH/s at 750W). Those are going to push gaming GPUs out of the ethereum market. Prices are going to come down quickly just like the last time ASICs hit the market. (Ethereum is ASIC-resistant, meaning any ASIC needs to look a lot like a GPU in terms of a powerful memory subsystem, which is much more difficult to optimize. It has never been impossible to improve the efficiency of the processing side of things - after all, a GPU is a kind of ASIC. You can think of these as Ethereum-optimized GPUs. The fact that these ASICs are only 4x as efficient as a general-purpose GPU says that the ASIC-resistance is actually working, in comparison the first Bitcoin ASICs were thousands of times as efficient as GPUs.)
- mchannon 9y agoOnce Ethereum moves to proof-of-stake (supposedly this year) that would render any such effort pretty silly on their part. There are other nascent cryptocurrencies that may make an effort worthwhile.
- paulmd 9y agoEthereum is more than 18 months behind schedule on the PoS switchover, this time last year people were saying we would already be on PoS right now. Now the switchover is "maybe Q1 next year", and he made some statements that sound an awful lot like it's going to be pushed back to 3-5 years. Vitalik can't actually deliver this product. He's a teenager who made a Bitcoin clone with a different hashing algorithm, not a super-genius software engineer. He's way out of his depth and he's not delivering. It's even sillier to take him seriously at this point in time, and Bitmain is putting their money where their mouth is. The only real question is whether Vitalik will hardfork and screw up their implementation... but then next time Bitmain will just keep it in-house and not tell anyone. They already pre-mine with them before selling to customers, business is business. (remember, Bitcoin includes a scripting language for smart contracts too! It was just partially disabled due to bugs in the original implementation that nobody ever bothered to fix. And nowadays the development process has dragged to a halt from infighting between various stakeholders, they are effectively incapable of making significant decisions. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script )
- Dylan16807 9y ago> “I’m using my electricity, my time and my effort to allow the cryptocurrency world to thrive.” Come on, don't let him get away with that lie. More miners bring no benefits to the ecosystem.
- astaroth360 9y agoAnother negative point to throw on the pile. Cryptocurrency has been overhyped to an unbelievable degree. It is environmentally harmful and generally a nuisance. I like making money off of wildly fluctuating markets as much as the next guy, but cryto is, at least in its current form, pretty damn stupid. All this enthusiasm for something which, as of now, there still isn't really a good use case for, is crazy.
- Scoundreller 9y agoIt trickles down too. My friend was going to throw out an old computer. I pulled out the ancient ATI video card and sold it for $50 on eBay.
- themanual 9y agoBTW, I use a private VPN server which can be setup on aws in a few minutes https://github.com/webdigi/AWS-VPN-Server-Setup https://github.com/webdigi/AWS-VPN-Server-Setup No logging on server side guaranteed as it is your own server. AWS could monitor but I don't mind that
- themanual 9y agoIgnore above, meant for another post