It also doesn't help that we're still paying a 25% tariff on video cards from China, which is pretty much everything but Nvidia FEs, AMD reference, and EVGA. Tariffs are normally used to equalize the cost of goods from countries with cheaper prices to help bolster the importing country's own goods (i.e. put a tariff on Chinese lumber to avoid excessively undercutting American lumber). The problem is that the vast majority of graphics cards are made in China, and they aren't undercutting non-Chinese graphics cards. I would assume that the vast majority of the cost of the GPU is in the components that are used to assembly it and not the assembly itself.
If you took 25% off the price that I paid for my 3080, then it would've cost about $900, which isn't far off of a typical, higher-end AIB variant's pricing. Outside of the current pricing conditions, I'd likely place it around $850+ compared to the base $700 price.
Well Larry I would say that the intended audience of GPUs is gamers not miners. The manufacturers have said as much and why we are getting LHR models now.
Nvidia made LHR cards so they could create mining-specific cards that cost more per hash. Nvidia loves to artificially restrict functionality (just like Intel) simply because it creates artificial barriers requiring spending more money on more expensive products to remove them. Another example is NVENC, which is limited to two streams on most cards simply... because. If you want unlimited streams, you have to buy specific Quadro cards, and it's not like the GeForce cards can't handle it. Crafty folks have removed the restrictions from the drivers, and the limited cards were able to handle as many streams as they could fit into memory.
LHR cards are charging you the same amount of money for less functionality. It doesn't even matter if you never want to mine anything. If you ever decide to sell your card, it is inherently worth less money because it isn't as capable as a non-LHR version.
I learned that lesson the hard way... if I kept the crypto that I mined back in 2013 and sold it during the recent market top, I probably could have bought a house with it.
I mined back then too, and I sold when BTC was only $30, because I figured it wasn't really going anywhere... that it was more "funny money" than anything. Of course, the constant volatility with how BTC had gone from $30 to <$10 and back to $30 did not help at all either.
Other than that, I also kick myself for ignoring the BTC thread on this very forum back when it was possible to mine with a CPU. I kept seeing it and passing it off as "just a fad".
I was a little hopeful when I hear about the release of LHR version of the GPUs. But apparently no one is making them because the card makers can make more money by selling the regular cards.
That's definitely not true. If you look a the Newegg Shuffle, the vast majority -- if not all -- of the cards are LHR. To be clear, some of them do a
bad job at denoting that they are LHR. For example, I got a 3080 from the Shufffle last week, and I thought nothing of it... until I noticed the "Rev 2.0" in the title. Revisions aren't uncommon on silicon; you'll even see them listed when you go to look for things like motherboard BIOS upgrades. However, for Gigabyte, "Rev 2.0" means LHR for any previously non-LHR card. Other AIBs will outright list "LHR" in the title. The EVGA 3060 Ti that was on the Shuffle today actually has no markers other than its product number, which is the LHR version's number. (If you look at the listing's specification, it does state that it's LHR.)