Well, since the fucking cryptocoin craze seems to be building into a frenzy(thus no price relief in sight on GPUs), and I want to play Fallout 4 and some other stuff I purchased in the past year, I finally broke down and bought an MSI GTX 1050 Ti 4GB card on sale for $140 (after rebate) at Newegg.
It’s no 1080, probably not even that close to the performance of a 1060, but it’s also not ridiculously overpriced at $400-$800 either. In any event, in my system it will let me play the games I want to play at frame rates and resolutions I can enjoy. So for under $150 it’s a nice stopgap.
Besides, the rest of my system now becomes the bottleneck, so I need to look into upgrading that as well. A nice new Intel Core i5 and MSI mobo are not a problem, but holy shit, when did RAM prices jump through the roof? 16GB (8x2) for $200?!?! It was half that a year ago!
You’re right–I just checked an order of 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 I made on December 22nd last year and it was $105.99. I sure dodged a bullet, I guess. Today it’s at 204.99 on Amazon.
Yeah with all the same companies making memory for smartphones and ssds regular old ram has become ridiculous.
The video card market has officially gone insane. Just checked Amazon and newegg, 1070 and 1080 cards are out of stock and what’s left is going for a price-gouging $1000+. I feel bad for anyone upgrading their PC right now.
I can say heartily and without any qualifications, fuck crypto miners.
I guess some sort of thanks to Meltdown/Spectre for making me push off any major hardware upgrades, then.
Oghier
1651
Yep. I had planned to replace my laptop this winter, and I was considering the desktop as well. Between the CPU problems and GPU scarcity, I’ve put those thoughts to bed for… I dunno, a year?
I wonder how long it will take for these things to sort out?
Nesrie
1652
If this is bothering you, best avoid looking at RAM too, although prices are up there for different reasons I’m told.
Hear hear. This whole cryptocurrency BS might cause a serious hiatus in the development of big budget AAA games, or at least of Windows ports of them. If no one can buy a decent mid-range card for less than 350 bucks, where’s the demand for the games?
Oh the games will still get made, it will just be to more modest graphical targets. Anyone sitting on a launch 1070 will probably be able to play everything at highest settings for years to come!
Quaro
1655
God damn this is no exaggeration. Literally can not find a 1070 or 1080 in stock anywhere close to retail prices. Might as well get a 1080 ti for 700 since it’s only a tiny bit more but even those are gone everywhere. This is the worst possible time to try and replace my video card.
Yeah I just checked Amazon, and zero GTX1080 cards in stock. Crazy!
Quaro
1657
It’s especially crazy because these Nvidia cards are what 18 months old? They’ve had plenty of time production.
habibi
1658
Aww crap, looks like I am stuck with 1080p gaming with this 1060 card for the foreseeable future…
Quaro
1660
I’d be happy to find a single 1070, 1070 Ti, 1080, 1080 Ti, not marked up way over retail. Just anything close the prices they were selling at months ago!
I guess the used market will explode in a couple months though.
vyshka
1661
Another thing that sucks about it is you are no longer able to return a retail purchased gpu unless it is broken, at least at Fry’s Electronics. I imagine other outlets have similar policies now. Picked up a cheap radeon card a while back for work, and noticed the new policy.
I’ve been thinking about upgrading to a 1060/1070, but good luck–this shortage is ridiculous. When does the nextgen Nvidia card launch? Maybe that will loosen things up.
vyshka
1663
Unfortunately, I doubt anything will change it until the bitcoin market crashes, or gpu vendors figure a way to make it not worth mining with their gpus. And I doubt they would ever do that since they probably love this.
Quaro
1664
Video card availability has been this bad in the past and then recovered – as mining difficulty catches up, there should be another wave of time where the cards are less profitable even i the market doesn’t crash. But it could be a rough few months.
