Nvidia's 3000 Series RTX GPU [3050, 3060, 3070, 3080, 3090 now with TIs]

LMAO: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/15/chinas-bitcoin-miner-exodus-.html

I've got the Texas location; I've got the solar power. Now, if only the market suddenly floods with cards... Somehow, I doubt that will happen.

Last paragraph is most telling:

Incumbent politicians always see the "value" of wealth creation; the consequences not so much. IDK, if human civilization is fubar either way, is it really so wrong to cash in by pouring fuel on the fire? Probably, but maybe I can lie to myself.

 

If you have excess solar power why is it an ecological disaster?

 

In USA, Covid has reduced the amount of $ people have to spend on frivolous activities as unemployment has risen greatly. Businesses everywhere have gone under and those that don't have had to resort to furloughs/lay offs. I find it crazy to suggest Covid has somehow increased the number of people willing to pay exorbitant prices for a gaming GPU.

 

Well there were a lot of people who kept their jobs, had a decent income then received some stimulus money to spend.

 

If they couldn't afford to spend crazy money on a GPU before, the stimulus check isn't going to change that. Someone who is just getting by probably won't decide to just dump their entire stimulus check on a massively overpriced GPU.

 

A variety of reasons.... It is still energy conversion to heat in the quest of profit. Then there is the lowering of albedo & further heat absorption by the panels themselves. Probably not too much in my case, but can be an issue for larger installations. And the energy that is used for mining would otherwise be put back on the grid and *hopefully* offset less harmful, more necessary endeavors. It is always better to just use less energy. But I don't really have much hope for humanity regardless, so maybe I'll build a mining rig to pay for the system I actually want to build.

Amusingly, Texas power grid management actually has people trying to conserve energy now.

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/bu...could-come-close-to-outstripping-16249365.php

And this is where all the miners are supposed to come....

 

Covid had a very different impact on your life depending on where you live/work. Entertainment spending dropped significantly for lots of folks - after work happy hours, expensive dinners, movies, concerts, sporting events. So many people had a lot of extra cash burning a hole in their pocket even before the stimulus and needed to find ways to entertain themselves indoors.

 

I don't think those people who previously had no interest in high end PC gaming are suddenly going to pick up the hobby. I suspect those that would venture to try video games wouldn't jump in for thousands as their starting point.

 

Why not? People pick up new hobbies all the time and this time they were forced to. A lot of the demand is also from existing gamers who upgraded earlier than they would have if it wasn’t for the pandemic.

 

Maybe not picking up the hobby completely from zero, but I know some (anecdotal!) people, for which the importance of PC gaming climbed up on their personal ranking, so they are willing to spend more money on it than they were before. What I don't know of course, is whether or not that group is of numerical significance.

 

I'm not saying there aren't any, just that they will be few and far between. I think it's much more likely they would try out a console for starters before deciding to drop $1500-3k on a GPU alone.

 

NVidia, at Ampere's launch, seemed aware that many Pascal gamers didn't want Turing, so made Ampere "unignorable" with its price and performance. In other words NVidia thought there was pent-up demand, e.g. from Pascal gamers who'd delayed their upgrade to entirely skip Turing!

Clearly that's not the whole story.

Moral of this story: make so much money from the 2011 bubble that any possible profit from mining now is a pittance, and pay whatever the hell it costs to get the gaming rig you want

 

Gaming is more than just "gaming". For some games a console really isn't that great. We're also talking about a cohort who already own PCs, many will be older (>30) and in well paid jobs. They decide during the pandemic to pick up, oh I don't know say MSFS2020 for a bit of relaxation in the evening. "Oh, this sucks quite a lot on my current graphics card, I'll pick up a new one".

 

I think demand would be high to match say 1080Ti levels. But I really don't believe more than a small minority of gamers are just willing to pay triple MSRP.

 

These aren't 3x MSRP:

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Available at Overclockers UK

There's around 70 of those available there. Yes there is a premium and 6900XTs are also available at a premium. 6700XTs too.

Some big NVidia numbers here for the most recent week:

Week 24 Mindfactory.de Total Gaming GPU Sales 5440 Units Nvidia 84.92% and Radeon 15.08% : realAMD (reddit.com)

 

I'm not really talking about those who are barely getting by. And you're trying to rationalize the irrational. People spends way to much on things they don't need all the time and this situation exacerbated that for many. Someone who was previously willing to spend $800 on a GPU before might have and decided given their better financial situation to spend $1500 instead for exactly the same product.

Does it make sense at all? No, but obviously there are a lot of consumers buying them anyway, and not for mining.

 

The amount of people willing to spend $800 is very small to begin with. That subset isn't what's driving this craziness IMO. The only other time GPUs have ever been so hard to purchase and at almost as high of prices was the previous crypto mining craze.

 

But we can comment on the likelyhood of this factor being the sole culprit for generating a drought of >$600 graphics cards in retailers and etailers that has lasted 9 months and shows no signs of stopping, which is what's being suggested here.

AMD's public data showed that >80% of gamers paid only up to $400 for their GPUs back in 2018, but all of a sudden the $600-$1200 price brackets keep vanishing from the stores, and we're supposed to believe this is completely unrelated to the fact that these cards are also the most profitable to mine ETH & friends?
Come on...

 

We have a shortage as well so if maybe only 15% of PC gamers will spend $500 or more that's still a lot of gamers wanting to spend a lot on their GPU where the supply is very limited.

 

Yeah, it does not always have to be black and white, there are shades of grey - depending on your color depth maybe even more than 50.

Seriously though, a lot has happened since 2018. Nvidia had their not exactly cheap Turings out there with, basically re-opening a four-digit price braket again and continuing that trend with Ampere. Whereas AMD did not really compete in the >500 USD space for a while, focussing more on the mainstream brakets.

I think there are a a lot of cards going into mining operations as well as into home-build rigs from people with low electricity rates who have seen on reddit how to get teh riches fast. Those people do not think inside traditional price brakets for video cards, they just think about ROI time.

Then there are people, which I think are a minority, who have elevated their spendings for PC Gaming since the beginning of the pandemic for two reasons: They spent more time inside, playing games and two, they were giving up at some point to get a card at MRSP. Or went on to buy a pre-built PC or a gaming notebook - those probably are larger volume markets than the DIY crowd anyway.

So, in the end, I think all groups are responsible for the current situation, but miners where one of the root causes at the tipping point of the economy of scarcity, which we have right now in GPU retail.