Question Where can you get a decent nVidia graphics card these days?

[BonzaiDuck]

I'm sure there's a big ongoing discussion about the short supply of GFX cards, but I wanted to buy one in the not-too-distant future.

My GTX-1070 Mini OC card, when you can find it, is priced at around $1,000!! I paid half that amount four years ago!

I need a "Mini" card -- or I want one. All I find out there is an ASUS GTX-1650 or 1660. And I was interested in an RTX-2070 Mini. Fat chance!

WHEN can we find decent graphics cards again?! What the hell is going on? The story I heard has to do with some bitcoin-mining-fever. I just don't understand it!

 

[Ajay]

No where. Well, Nvidia branded cards at BB if you manage to catch them when they drop. Everything else is generally priced out of sight, unless you don't mind paying $700+ for a 3060 Ti.

 

[Mopetar]

I was able to get a new Ampere card last night, quite easily in fact. But then I woke up and realized it had only been a dream.

 

[VirtualLarry]

WHEN can we find decent graphics cards again?! What the hell is going on? The story I heard has to do with some bitcoin-mining-fever. I just don't understand it!

You're a little late to the (GPU-buying) party. Since mid/late-Dec., prices on GPUs have been consistently creeping upwards. I suppose that now, "market prices" (ebay) are nearly 3X MSRP.

Part of that is (coin) mining, part of that is a mfg supply shortage, both of silicon wafers and supporting components, part of it is pandemic-related supply-line shortages, part of it is (Trump) tarriffs. Mostly, due to insane levels of demand (of which coin mining is large part, but gamers looking to upgrade is another large part), and a shortage of supply.

In short, you're not going to find any cards available, unless:
1) You are hella lucky, and find a "stock drop" at a retailer, and manage to click-through "buy" fast enough,
2) Willing to use "Bots" to buy your cards for you, or
3) Willing to pay extremely marked-up prices to resellers ("scalpers") on ebay or otherwise.

 

[VirtualLarry]

No where. Well, Nvidia branded cards at BB if you manage to catch them when they drop. Everything else is generally priced out of sight, unless you don't mind paying $700+ for a 3060 Ti.

This is, unfortunately, accurate.

The flip side is, EVEN IF the card in question costs $700 or $1200, WHY NOT buy it AT THAT INFLATED PRICE and then MINE COIN on it, UNTIL PAID FOR?

Kind of like, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." Pay the higher price for the GPU(s), with the understanding that you can mine on them to make that money BACK.

Conceptually, if you're not willing to do even that, instead, you're waiting for prices to drop, then:
1) You'll be wait a rather LONG time, or
2) You're just a (lazy) whiner, or even
3) You're too poor to even consider owning a decent GPU, you should be buying bread and milk and paying the rent instead.

Edit: Or,
4) Don't think that paying off the card is going to be possible in the near-term, due to EIP-1559 for Ethereum blockchain dropping in July, and reducing block rewards for miners due to "burning BASEFEE".

 

[balloonshark]

The best way is to buy a prebuilt with the card you want. Keep the card and sell the PC locally.

For example this refurb goes in and out of stock but the CPU doesn't have graphics so you would need to sell the PC as is or throw in a cheap gpu of some sort. https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...orce-gtx-1650-super-4gb-459-shipped.2591238/f

Slickdeals has been posting lots of prebuilts lately.

P.S. I want a 3060ti or 3070.

 

[CP5670]

Get a prebuilt, or try a retail place like Microcenter. They get some of the cards fairly regularly, but you have to be there when the store opens.

 

[fleshconsumed]

1. Line up at 5-6am at microcenter on Tuesday/Thursday/Friday if you live near one.
2. Pay a scalper
3. If you have an office job have discord open that tracks stock (ATR and StockDrops) and hope you get lucky with BB stock drop, even then even if you do everything perfectly your chances of getting a card are about 10%.

These are your only choices. You have no chance with newegg/amazon/B&H/Zotac, because bots clear those out in 5 seconds flat.

 

[Sable]

Nvidia rtx 3080 OC ASUS used | eBay

Sold as used. Working fine.

www.ebay.co.uk

£15,000...


AHAHAHAHAHAA

 

[NTMBK]

Grand theft GPU: $340,000 worth of RTX 3090s “fell off a truck” in China

Make a list: ✔ Check it twice: ✔ Don't really care who's naughty or nice: ✔

arstechnica.com

It's the most reliable way at this point...

 

[Leeea]

I'm sure there's a big ongoing discussion about the short supply of GFX cards, but I wanted to buy one in the not-too-distant future.

My GTX-1070 Mini OC card, when you can find it, is priced at around $1,000!! I paid half that amount four years ago!

I need a "Mini" card -- or I want one. All I find out there is an ASUS GTX-1650 or 1660. And I was interested in an RTX-2070 Mini. Fat chance!

WHEN can we find decent graphics cards again?! What the hell is going on? The story I heard has to do with some bitcoin-mining-fever. I just don't understand it!

Your local drug dealer will have them stocked, between the Heroin and the Crystal.

These are your only choices. You have no chance with newegg/amazon/B&H/Zotac, because bots clear those out in 5 seconds flat.

I would like to say this is untrue. 5 seconds makes it sound as if you have a chance.


It is more like 5 nanoseconds. You have no chance whatsoever. The bots are assembled in massive numbers in the cloud, typically at the same cloud hosting facility that is hosting the service the sells the GPU. It is many thousands of bots with inhuman reflexes and 0 latency VS you, the pathetic meat bag with a crappy >1 ms connection and 270+ ms reaction time.

Your odds of success are: None, Nada, Zip, Zilch, Zero, and Not gonna happen.
Dream on pathetic human!

Welcome to cloud! Welcome the glorious AI driven future!

. . .


ps:
Dark twist of cruel fate: The same style system is being implemented for your Covid vaccine signup.

 

[John1780]

Your local drug dealer will have them stocked, between the Heroin and the Crystal.


I would like to say this is untrue. 5 seconds makes it sound as if you have a chance.


It is more like 5 nanoseconds. You have no chance whatsoever. The bots are assembled in massive numbers in the cloud, typically at the same cloud hosting facility that is hosting the service the sells the GPU. It is many thousands of bots with inhuman reflexes and 0 latency VS you, the pathetic meat bag with a crappy >1 ms connection and 270+ ms reaction time.

Your odds of success are: None, Nada, Zip, Zilch, Zero, and Not gonna happen.
Dream on pathetic human!

Welcome to cloud! Welcome the glorious AI driven future!

. . .


ps:
Dark twist of cruel fate: The same style system is being implemented for your Covid vaccine signup.

Has the situation worsened significantly in the last few months? I was able to snag a 6900xt and 3070 using Discord channels (Snail Monitor and ATR) back in Jan. Got old wearing out the F5 button nightly at 6:30, but it did eventually work.

 

[Leeea]

Has the situation worsened significantly in the last few months? I was able to snag a 6900xt and 3070 using Discord channels (Snail Monitor and ATR) back in Jan. Got old wearing out the F5 button nightly at 6:30, but it did eventually work.

Yes.

I was able to use a bot to snag a 6900xt off of AMDs website, I would have had no chance otherwise. The rush of bot requests prior to the drop results in most requests returning an error page. I was not fully automated, and as such the more popular products ( 6800xt and 6800 ) I never even received a valid response on. I lucked out getting a valid response on the 6900, and on the add to cart, after that I went to paypal which does not error out and is said to be a more reliable way to complete the purchase.


The bots are designed to be ran in a VM or Docker container, so the user can run them right in the same cloud facility of the service selling the GPU. This alone is not enough however.
Basically the GPU selling service gets pounded, with the majority of the responses being error pages
of the successful response, the majority of add to card follow up requests receive a error page response
and so on

To successfully purchase a GPU, each purchasing attempt has to win the lottery over and over. Repeatedly getting responses that are not error pages and not out of stock throughout the purchasing process.

Even with bots, most purchase attempts are failures. The thing is, many bots can be spawned, over whelming the awful odds with sheer numbers. This undoubtedly makes the problem much worse.

-----------------------------------

Lastly, this is 100% AMD's and Nvidia's fault. Not the scalpers, not the miners. AMD's & Nvidia's acceptable and preferred outcome. There is NOTHING stopping either company from simply implementing a queue or wait list on their OEM sites. This would be far cheaper, as they would not be DDOSed on every drop. The expensive and endless credit card disputes associated with digital river would disappear.


Yet the only company to even attempt consumer friendly activity is EVGA. If you look on EBAY, it is nearly impossible to find an EVGA 3000 series. This says everything you need to know.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Honestly, unless you're going to use your card to mine for most hours of the day, PC gaming feels like it's for suckers, especially with how good the two current gen consoles are for $500 (think Ryzen 3700 + GTX 2070 Super / 2080 Super minus DLSS and with lesser raytracing). Last time we had a huge boom cycle for crypto in 2018 both Nvidia and AMD saw what people would pay for gpus and hugely increased prices at all levels for Turing and Navi vs Pascal and Polaris, and with this boom in crypto being even bigger and shooting gpu prices to the moon you can probably expect another price bump next gpu gen even if crypto has crashed and mining has died way down.

 

[VirtualLarry]

and with this boom in crypto being even bigger and shooting gpu prices to the moon you can probably expect another price bump next gpu gen even if crypto has crashed and mining has died way down.

Sad but true...

 

[fleshconsumed]

Honestly, unless you're going to use your card to mine for most hours of the day, PC gaming feels like it's for suckers, especially with how good the two current gen consoles are for $500 (think Ryzen 3700 + GTX 2070 Super / 2080 Super minus DLSS and with lesser raytracing). Last time we had a huge boom cycle for crypto in 2018 both Nvidia and AMD saw what people would pay for gpus and hugely increased prices at all levels for Turing and Navi vs Pascal and Polaris, and with this boom in crypto being even bigger and shooting gpu prices to the moon you can probably expect another price bump next gpu gen even if crypto has crashed and mining has died way down.

Again, I disagree on the last part. Current pricing is driven by the perfect combination of pandemic, silicon shortage, and crypto boom, that hit all at the same time. The only reason I can even justify paying $500 (nevermind scalping prices) for a midrange 3070 is because I can mine when I'm not gaming to offset the cost. If mining goes away in a year when ETH goes PoS then demand will fall and assuming silicon shortage is over prices will go down to more reasonable levels.

 

[Mopetar]

I'm sure people would line up to pay those higher prices instead of snagging one of the used GPUs hitting the market at reduced prices. That's why Turing was such a success and . . . What's that? It didn't sell all that well and shareholders got angry at Nvidia because people were happy to buy discounted Pascal cards instead. Who would have thought.

Keep in mind this was when AMD didn't even have competition for almost half of Nvidia's product stack since the fasted card they had was an upper mi-range 5700XT. People will be even less willing to pay marked up prices now that there's more competition. Nvidia knows this which is why they chose a $700 MSRP for the 3080 and why the 3070 which was effectively a 2080 Ti was sold for well under half the price.

Maybe those things would have changed if they knew another mining boom was about to take off, but it's pretty clear that they knew how little they'd be able to gouge their own customers now that they had some actual choice. Frankly if there's still a massive boom when the next cards drop, Nvidia should set the MSRP at market value. Screw letting scalpers make buckets of profit that could go to Nvidia (or AMD) instead.

 

[Leeea]

PC gaming feels like it's for suckers

PC gaming offers a premium gaming experience unavailable to consoles.

Far more games. Modding games*. A catalog going back decades**, and emulation for older consoles. Better resolution, fps, color***, and detail. Options to disable or mod out motion blur, depth blur, etc. Far better support for games as they age. Superior social media experience ( discord, teamspeak, whatever ). No monthly fee.

*While the strongest point of a PC, also the weakest as cheating is more common on PC. Ex: Dark Souls 3 is hacked on both PC and Console****, but even so hacks less common and less noticeable on the console version.

** Even multiplayer games like neverwinter nights 1 from 1998, or mechwarrior 3 from 1999 have active gaming communities and can be played to this day. Value is not only retained, but improves over time.

***mods like reshade can hack in HDR support for games that never had it, fix poor HDR implementations, or allow the user to tweak existing HDR implementations

**** primarily save file hacks and glitching

Not to mention when it is all said and done, the gamer still has a powerful PC for non-gaming activities.

 

[CP5670]

This is why I've remained exclusively a PC gamer over the years. I've built up a big library of games, emulators, mods over time and it's like a long-standing personal project now. I agree that it's hard to justify PC over consoles at the moment though.

 

[killster1]

This is, unfortunately, accurate.

The flip side is, EVEN IF the card in question costs $700 or $1200, WHY NOT buy it AT THAT INFLATED PRICE and then MINE COIN on it, UNTIL PAID FOR?

Kind of like, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." Pay the higher price for the GPU(s), with the understanding that you can mine on them to make that money BACK.

Conceptually, if you're not willing to do even that, instead, you're waiting for prices to drop, then:
1) You'll be wait a rather LONG time, or
2) You're just a (lazy) whiner, or even
3) You're too poor to even consider owning a decent GPU, you should be buying bread and milk and paying the rent instead.

Edit: Or,
4) Don't think that paying off the card is going to be possible in the near-term, due to EIP-1559 for Ethereum blockchain dropping in July, and reducing block rewards for miners due to "burning BASEFEE".

because i would actually lose money mining 40 cents per kwh aint going to do much favors. I see loads of cards on ebay and craigslist.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

because i would actually lose money mining 40 cents per kwh aint going to do much favors. I see loads of cards on ebay and craigslist.

Come to Texas, we were $9 per kwh for a 4-5 day span in February. Not joking.

 

[killster1]

Come to Texas, we were $9 per kwh for a 4-5 day span in February. Not joking.

yea i saw it on the news, devastating but i would pay 20$ kwh if there was no choice. (wonder how much my gas / propane generators cost to run ) ((my house overseas has rolling brown outs daily.

 

[bejellio]

I really thought we would baseline in Feb...Then March.... Here's to hoping we will baseline in April =).

 

[Justinus]

There will be no baseline until the mining demand ends.

 

[bejellio]

Hard to imagine these prices would stay this high for so long. It would be interesting to see if this spawned the demand for other companies to make their own 3D cards. Perhaps a new 3dfx will come back?