Has anyone tried to buy a new graphics card lately?

hanselthecaretaker

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I've been looking for a midrange card, and happened across a vs. between the RX480 and GT1060 [https://www.windowscentral.com/amd-rx-480-vs-nvidia-gtx-1060], wherein they state the 480's 8GB version is $230. Click the link and it shows the card isn't even available anymore outside of resellers, and the average price is

A guy at Tom's Hardware said the market has gone stupid with the cryptomining craze. Dammit I want to play The Witcher 3 but am not paying double for a card to do it.

I suppose I'll have to either bite the bullet or wait for the insanity to end, or at least die down a bit.


Good read [https://blockgeeks.com/guides/what-is-cryptocurrency/], btw. Also this. [https://www.coindesk.com/the-dao-bitcoin-development/] Kinda tough to believe the claims of this stuff being more secure than Fort Knox, along with the first article even mentioning a hacker being able to steal them from your computer.
 
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I have a relatively new PC I built with a friend and I'm using a GEFORCE GTX 1050Ti card. It's pretty good, runs all of the games I've tried (Shadow of Mordor, Overwatch, Prey, Alien Isolation) on High settings. Only set me back about $245 bucks.

It's not the most amazeballs graphics card out there, I know, but it's pretty solid.
 

Avnger

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hanselthecaretaker said:
I've been looking for a midrange card, and happened across a vs. between the RX480 and GT1060 [https://www.windowscentral.com/amd-rx-480-vs-nvidia-gtx-1060], wherein they state the 480's 8GB version is $230. Click the link and it shows the card isn't even available anymore outside of resellers, and the average price is

A guy at Tom's Hardware said the market has gone stupid with the cryptomining craze. Dammit I want to play The Witcher 3 but am not paying double for a card to do it.

I suppose I'll have to either bite the bullet or wait for the insanity to end, or at least die down a bit.


Good read [https://blockgeeks.com/guides/what-is-cryptocurrency/], btw.
I was taking a look at them to buy one for my younger brother a few weeks ago, and I agree that the prices have gone absolutely crazy. I bought an NVIDIA GTX 970 three years ago, and the price for it now is at least what it was back then. I helped a different brother build a pc a couple of years ago, and the NVIDIA GTX 980 he got has definitely gone up in price since then.
 

CriticalGaming

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I'm of the opinion that you are better off spending extra money on the things that you really spend a lot of time using. Matresses, cars, and if you are a heavy gamer, a good GPU.

That being said, I would go with a GTX 1070 for about 400 bucks.

The inflation of price on the GTX 980 is because it was found to be one of the best GPU's for bitcoin mining, whatever the fuck that means. So that's why the price of the cards are stupid right now.

For pure gaming needs, just get a 1070.
 

Adam Jensen_v1legacy

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hanselthecaretaker said:
I suppose I'll have to either bite the bullet or wait for the insanity to end, or at least die down a bit.
If you don't want to spend a lot of money, you can get a comparable older model like the Nvidia GTX 970 or AMD R9 290/390. They preform in the 480/1060 range. You can get a used one for dirt cheap. It should last you long enough for this insanity to blow over. I'd recommend Nvidia because 970's weren't used for mining cryptocurrency so a used one will probably be in better shape than a used AMD, but also because The Witcher 3 runs better on an Nvidia GPU.
 

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I bought a 1080Ti back in March which cost me around $1000 but I'm one of those people who must play games on the highest settings at 60fps as a minimum. Hopefully, I'm set for a couple of years. Hardware's been getting more and more expensive, which sucks.
 

chozo_hybrid

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Still using my GTX 960, still seems to run the current games okay, latest thing I had played in terms of releases was the newest Tomb Raider. So I think it's got some life left in it.
 

laggyteabag

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Yep, Cryptocurrency mining has shot GPU prices through the roof, particularly for AMD cards.

NVidia cards have been relatively unaffected, and are generally the better choice for games, anyway.

Here in the UK you can get a 3GB 1060 for 175GBP, and in America, you can get one for $210 from Newegg.

Seems reasonable enough to me.
 

Gordon_4_v1legacy

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Now I feel super lucky that my brother sold me his 8GB 1070GTX dor $250AUD. Jesus this cryptocurrency shit is crazy.
 

BreakfastMan

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I bought an 8GB GTX 1070 early last year for around 400 US. Prices seemed pretty normal then...

But if you want to play The Witcher 3, you don't need an insane card to do it. It seems to be pretty well optimised; I got it to play with all the graphics set to Low and the resolution turned down on a laptop running a Geforce 940M.
 
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Ok, wait, what the hell does bitcoin have to do with graphics cards? How do you "Mine" cryptocurrency?! 0_o I gotta google this shit.

(one google later)

...What the actual hell, we live in a weirdass world.

https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/01/economist-explains-11

So, people are buying tons of graphics cards to create computers that can verify the legitimacy of cryptocurrency units and transfers, because if your rig somehow solves it first you get some free bitcoin?

That is just WEIRD on so many levels. :eek: Technology is amazing.
 

Karthesios

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Tell me about it. I bought a 1070Ti when they first came out and broke my personal record for priciest single PC component. I don't regret it though.
 

Ironman126

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I bought the 6GB version of the Nvidia GTX 1060 for about $240 six months ago. They go for just a little more than that ($260ish) these days. I consider it an absolute hotrod of a GPU, but I was in struggle forest with an old 640 series for five years, so I'm biased. Regardless, it's good value for money, in my opinion. I can run everything on High and quite a few games on maximum settings.

It is a double-sized card and requires a separate power cable for the on-board fan, which is not something I had seen before, so that's something to note if your case is small or your power supply is older.
 

Tsun Tzu

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Not at all a good time for building a PC, unfortunately.

Between RAM prices and cryptomining, you're kinda getting boned.

That said, a cheap, used 970 would handle Witcher 3 just fine at 1080p. According to benchs I've seen, it still hangs with the 2 or 3gb 1060 and 480.

Hell, a 570 (rx570, not gtx 570) would handle 1080p well enough.

Source: My cheap, used (by me, but still) 970.

I was waiting for Vega...but AMD fucked that up. So now I'm waiting for Volta, I guess.
 

Bad Jim

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The price of Bitcoin and various other crytpocurrencies has gone up over 10X this year. I know this because I got $75 in Bitcoin this year, let it sit on my account for months and now I can afford a graphics card. Obviously the increased price means plenty of incentive to mine cryptocurrencies.

Another development has been Ethereum, a relatively popular currency now which cannot be efficiently mined with ASICs, the most efficient way to mine it is with GPUs. Apparently this is by design. They wanted the average PC user to be able to mine it, not just businesses running rooms full of ASICs. Personally I'd rather have cheap graphics cards, but that's what they did.

There is some debate on whether cryptocurrency is itself a bubble or the future of currency, but the recent upswing looks a lot like a bubble. My prediction is that mining operations will ramp up, prices will fall, speculators will be butthurt and PC gaming will once again be affordable.

In the meantime, consider mining currencies yourself. Maybe not a full scale mining operation, but you could buy a 1060 for gaming and mine Ethereum with it when you aren't playing games, which should help offset the cost.
 

hanselthecaretaker

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Adam Jensen said:
hanselthecaretaker said:
I suppose I'll have to either bite the bullet or wait for the insanity to end, or at least die down a bit.
If you don't want to spend a lot of money, you can get a comparable older model like the Nvidia GTX 970 or AMD R9 290/390. They preform in the 480/1060 range. You can get a used one for dirt cheap. It should last you long enough for this insanity to blow over. I'd recommend Nvidia because 970's weren't used for mining cryptocurrency so a used one will probably be in better shape than a used AMD, but also because The Witcher 3 runs better on an Nvidia GPU.

Is The Witcher 3 one of those games with an Nvidia logo splashed on the intro? If so I might just do something like that, because that game is the golden ticket I've been waiting for.
 

hanselthecaretaker

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Laggyteabag said:
Yep, Cryptocurrency mining has shot GPU prices through the roof, particularly for AMD cards.

NVidia cards have been relatively unaffected, and are generally the better choice for games, anyway.

Here in the UK you can get a 3GB 1060 for 175GBP, and in America, you can get one for $210 from Newegg.

Seems reasonable enough to me.
Wonder why AMD cards are so much more valued for this kinda thing, as performance has been pretty even keel with Nvidia for quite a few years. Sure they leap frog each other once in a while but that always happens.
 

hanselthecaretaker

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aegix drakan said:
Ok, wait, what the hell does bitcoin have to do with graphics cards? How do you "Mine" cryptocurrency?! 0_o I gotta google this shit.

(one google later)

...What the actual hell, we live in a weirdass world.

https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/01/economist-explains-11

So, people are buying tons of graphics cards to create computers that can verify the legitimacy of cryptocurrency units and transfers, because if your rig somehow solves it first you get some free bitcoin?

That is just WEIRD on so many levels. :eek: Technology is amazing.

It's like Folding @ Home from 10 years ago but now on crack. The part in that link about some miners giving up due to the exorbitant costs outweighing potential benefits gives some hope that things will return to normalcy.

We're in a bit of a currency-wild-west period right now, but like always, it won't be long before it'll be regulated somehow, some way. Greed is the defacto culprit, as this is clearly proving. It'll either end up being hacked first as-is, or some conglomerate will accumulate a majority holding, and then they'll be hacked.

It never ends. For every capacity of human greatness, human stupidity isn't far behind.
 

hanselthecaretaker

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Bad Jim said:
The price of Bitcoin and various other crytpocurrencies has gone up nearly 10X this year. I know this because I got $75 in Bitcoin this year, let it sit on my account for months and now I can afford a graphics card. Obviously the increased price means plenty of incentive to mine cryptocurrencies.

Another development has been Ethereum, a relatively popular currency now which cannot be efficiently mined with ASICs, the most efficient way to mine it is with GPUs. Apparently this is by design. They wanted the average PC user to be able to mine it, not just businesses running rooms full of ASICs. Personally I'd rather have cheap graphics cards, but that's what they did.

There is some debate on whether cryptocurrency is itself a bubble or the future of currency, but the recent upswing looks a lot like a bubble. My prediction is that mining operations will ramp up, prices will fall, speculators will be butthurt and PC gaming will once again be affordable.

In the meantime, consider mining currencies yourself. Maybe not a full scale mining operation, but you could buy a 1060 for gaming and mine Ethereum with it when you aren't playing games, which should help offset the cost.

Does everyone who mines (even the little guys) end up benefiting though? In the economist link above it sounds like more of a "whoever crosses the finish line first" takes all, which is why there are people with room fulls of daisy-chained GPU's at twice or more than the cost they're worth and the smaller guys are giving up.

It would definitely make more sense if all contributors benefited, but who really knows what the true intentions of its creator were. To avoid a situation like that link described, and to remain truly decentralized, it almost seems like a contribution cap needs to be put in place to prevent abuse.