'This Is a Bad Time to Build a High-End Gaming PC' (extremetech.com) 177
Joel Hruska, writing at ExtremeTech: It's not just a question of whether top-end hardware is available, but whether midrange and last-gen hardware is selling at reasonable prices. If you want to go AMD, be aware that Ryzen 5000 CPUs are hard to find and the 6800 and 6800 XT are vanishingly rare. The upper-range Ryzen 3000 CPUs available on Amazon and Newegg are also selling for well above their prices six months ago. If you want to build an Intel system, the situation is a little different. A number of the 9th and 10th-gen chips are actually priced at MSRP and not too hard to find. The Core i7-9700K has fallen to $269, for example, and it's still one of Intel's fastest gaming CPUs. At that price, paired with a Z370 motherboard, you could build a gaming-focused system, so long as you don't actually need a new high-end GPU. The Core i7-10700K is $359, which isn't quite as competitive, but it squares off reasonably well against chips like the 3700X at $325. Amazon and Newegg both report the 3600X selling for more, at $400 and $345, respectively.
But even if these prices are appealing, the current GPU market makes building a gaming system much above lower-midrange to midrange a non-starter. Radeon 6000 GPUs and RTX 3000 GPUs are both almost impossible to find, and the older, slower, and less feature-rich cards that you can buy are almost all selling for more today than they were six months ago. Not every GPU has been kicked into the stratosphere, but between the cards you can't buy and the cards you shouldn't buy, there's a limited number of deals currently on the market. Your best bet is to set up price alerts on specific SKUs you are watching with the vendor in question. There is some limited good news, though: DRAM and SSDs are both still reasonably priced. DRAM and SSD prices are both expected to decline 10-15 percent through Q4 2020 compared with the previous quarter, and there are good deals to be had on both. [...] Power supply prices look reasonable, too, and motherboard availability looks solid. If you don't need to buy a GPU right now and you're willing to or prefer to use Intel, there's a more reasonable case to be made for building a system. But if you need a high-end GPU and/or want a high-end Ryzen chip to go with it, you may be better off shopping prebuilt systems or waiting a few more months.
But even if these prices are appealing, the current GPU market makes building a gaming system much above lower-midrange to midrange a non-starter. Radeon 6000 GPUs and RTX 3000 GPUs are both almost impossible to find, and the older, slower, and less feature-rich cards that you can buy are almost all selling for more today than they were six months ago. Not every GPU has been kicked into the stratosphere, but between the cards you can't buy and the cards you shouldn't buy, there's a limited number of deals currently on the market. Your best bet is to set up price alerts on specific SKUs you are watching with the vendor in question. There is some limited good news, though: DRAM and SSDs are both still reasonably priced. DRAM and SSD prices are both expected to decline 10-15 percent through Q4 2020 compared with the previous quarter, and there are good deals to be had on both. [...] Power supply prices look reasonable, too, and motherboard availability looks solid. If you don't need to buy a GPU right now and you're willing to or prefer to use Intel, there's a more reasonable case to be made for building a system. But if you need a high-end GPU and/or want a high-end Ryzen chip to go with it, you may be better off shopping prebuilt systems or waiting a few more months.
It's also a bad time (Score:2)
I've been doing this on the side for the last decade and it kind of hurts to have to build PCs with what I consider substandard parts, because nothing else is available at sane prices.
Re:It's also a bad time (Score:5, Funny)
Yep, *everything* is built in now...not like it used to be fr sure.
All for a single PC, I remember having to buy
a card with multiple serial ports, ...and woe to you if any of them just had to have the same IRQ.
a card with a printer port,
a card with PS/2 ports for the mouse and keyboard,
a video card,
a sound card,
Re:It's also a bad time (Score:5, Funny)
...and woe to you if any of them just had to have the same IRQ.
I think you just triggered the PTSD in a lot of people over 40.
Shared IRQ (Score:3)
...and woe to you if any of them just had to have the same IRQ.
I think you just triggered the PTSD in a lot of people over 40.
...and a smug smile on the face of those who wrote their own interrupt handler in assembly.
Turns out it's actually pretty possible to share IRQ, as long as they don't happen at the same time and there's an official way to check if a given piece of hardware initiated the IRQ.
Putting both the sound card and the printer port on the same IRQ was a very common configuration. (Unless you had a fetish for playing a digital jingle whenever a print job starts)
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Also, speaking of IRQs, I don't know of a single game
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I don't recall every having to buy a card to get a PS/2 port. The keyboard port always came on the motherboard, even the original IBM-PC was that way.
Multi-IO card with serial and parallel ports, yes. And a hard disk controller. More than 1 MB of RAM? You'll need a card for that too. And maybe a floppy controller if that wasn't part of the multi-io card. CD-ROM controller, until it became practice to put them in sound cards. And then IDE CD-ROMs became a thing and by then IDE controller on the MB was
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I remember there were some propriety mice back in the early days that came with their own expansion card and used a round connector about the same size as the PS/2 connector, but definitely weren't PS/2. Others used some DB-like connector, and there were also standard serial mice too.
Later motherboards that still used the original AT form factor would sometimes ship with a bracket with a PS/2 port in it (and sometimes some other ports) that you'd install in an extra slot on your case and run the cables int
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Yeah I forgot about the disk controller card. Ugh.
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And, of course, the joy of that one program that just couldn't understand that you were forced to assign a non-standard IRQ to something.
Re:It's also a bad time (Score:5, Funny)
And the two cards that just HAD to have IRQ7 or whatever....oy, I need a drink.
I damn near wet my pants when I heard about USB..."It does what? And you can attach 127 devices? And they self-configure? And the ports are standard? And you plug stuff in and the OS just finds it and installs it?"
I thought I was being pranked,TBH.
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There I find something like 10th gen Intel K SKUs paired with H410 ITX mobos that come with 2x 4GB DDR4 2666MHz RAM. Not even to mention the fancy looking PC cases with plenty of RGB lighting but little airflow.
Sure, those component works together, but the CPU would do much better with a Z490 and some faster RAM (which would be more expensive ofc). But because a configuration like that might come with an RTX 3060 ti for something like 10
Intel FUD. (Score:4, Interesting)
"Noooo, don't build that high-end AMD system you've been dreaming about for Christmas! No, buy Intel I promise it's better somehow! I need you to believe it's better somehow!"
How much free hardware has this guy been given by Intel over the years?
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Please downvote these idiots.
Intel has its own foundries running its 'mature' but paid for 14nm node and supplying adequate number of chips. AMD and NVidia are competing with each other and also with Apple for precious foundry capacity because they don't have their own foundries. So supplies are limited for AMD and NVidia products while Intel is widely available.
rsilvergun stupidly says that "the industry needs to get scalpers under control" or there won't be an industry, doubtless with visions of vid
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Re:Intel FUD. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a little surprised that we haven't seen any retailers accepting backorder requests. I'd be perfectly happy to wait in a line, except nobody wants to maintain the line.
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I'm a little surprised that we haven't seen any retailers accepting backorder requests. I'd be perfectly happy to wait in a line, except nobody wants to maintain the line.
Retailers in general do not accept backorder requests for products they aren't about to backorder at suppliers. This isn't limited to IT. There's a difference between not-stocked, backordered, and unavailable. At the moment a lot of IT equipment falls in the last category.
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You are correct: there is no room for "component arbitrage" (read: scalpers) if there is sufficient supply to meet demand. Who would buy from some unknown on eBay who doesn't even accept returns when they can get it at ${RETAILER}, today, for the same or better price, with ${RETAILER}'s retail customer service standing behind the transaction?
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while Intel is widely available
Uh...Intel has its own problems, what with AMD forcing them to make bigger chips using the same wafer capacity, thus decreasing the number of actual SKUs made.
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Re:Intel FUD. (Score:5, Informative)
"Noooo, don't build that high-end AMD system you've been dreaming about for Christmas! No, buy Intel I promise it's better somehow! I need you to believe it's better somehow!"
How much free hardware has this guy been given by Intel over the years?
OK but what part of this article is incorrect? I've been hitting the local microcenter's website to check inventory for any generation Ryzen in the 65 TDP category for the past month and they're always sold out of all but the '3' series. But there are 8 Intel models in stock. Which is about what the article sums up to pointing out.
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That's because perhaps the new AMD CPUs are too good for the limited production capacity the company can control.
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Ok, try "Impossible to find for actual MSRP, instead of buying at insane markup from someone lucky enough to actually lay hands on a current generation AMD CPU"
Yeah, I can find a Ryzen 9 5900X on eBay too, but I'm not buying it for 2x or more than the MSRP.
Re: Intel FUD. (Score:2)
I don't think it's FUD (Score:2)
Re:Intel FUD. (Score:5, Informative)
Except that 5 seconds of searching for parts would tell you that none are available, and anyone who is looking for them can tell you that when they do show up for sale, they're gone in seconds. For example:
- Newegg shows completely sold out [newegg.com] on the entire Ryzen 5000 series
- AMD shows the same [amd.com]
- Feel free to look around for them yourself, you won't find them anywhere except scalpers putting huge markup on them.
I know this because I've been looking for a Ryzen 9 5900X since launch, and have only found frustration at getting one into my "shopping cart" only to get web server errors when attempting to check out, and then have them out of stock once the traffic starts to disappear.
And because of the complete lack of new latest parts, anyone with stock of n-1 generation parts is marking them up, because they know people still need to buy something in order to sell a computer - an AM4 socket is exactly useless with no CPU in it. I was lucky to find a Ryzen 5 2600X that wasn't marked up stupidly to use for the time being until parts availability improves, and even with that I can only load half the memory I planned into it because the 2600X's memory controller doesn't support the full 4 modules I purchased, where Ryzen 5000 does.
The summary didn't really strike me as "OMG buy Intel!!" so much as "Hey, if you haven't already locked into the spectacular platform that AMD has launched, you can actually find Intel parts that will still get the job done."
Now good luck finding a GPU that isn't ancient or massively overpriced. Even the n-1 generation upper-end cards are basically gone and the midrange are priced as if they are current generation technology.
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This Is a Bad Time to Build a High-End Gaming PC
How you twisted "Now is a bad time to build a PC" into "Now is a great time to build an Intel PC" could be the subject of a fascinating study on projection.
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I like everything about AMD in theory, but every time I put Linux on AMD CPUs and/or GPUs, I encounter an assortment of driver and stability problems that just don't happen with Intel/nVidia.
It seems to me that AMD is really only a good choice for windows-only users.
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Linus Torvalds has a AMD only setup, so I'm a bit surprised.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/... [zdnet.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] Linus Torvalds: On Nvidia
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Works for me. Ever since I upgraded from Cyrix.
Maybe you're doing it wrong?
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I think he made it clear that AMD is not viable in terms of CPUs (you really just can't buy them)
I bought one two weeks ago, no problem. (Ryzen 5 3600X)
My online store shows "in stock" if I need any more.
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Ryzen 5 3600X is previous generation. Ryzen 5000 series has been "launched" for a few weeks now.
We're talking about buying current generation parts, not previous generation parts still priced like current generation parts.
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Please give me a link to where I can purchase a Ryzen 9 5900X for actual MSRP.
Oh wait, you can't. Because it doesn't exist right now.
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Not the 5900X (that model's impossible) but I snagged a Ryzen 7 5800X at Microcenter last week. Walked in, bought it off the shelf. Easy cheesy.
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It was bad enough in March (Score:3)
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Turn in your card at the door.
Re:It was bad enough in March (Score:4, Informative)
I actually built 3 Threadrippers this year: a TR 1920X, 2950X, and a 3960X. I guess I was lucky to finish them off by February. I see the 24C/48T TR 3960X [amazon.com] is actually in stock on Amazon.
I ordered the Ryzen 5900X from B&H Photo literally the day it was available in Nov. and it STILL has been on back-order for over a month.
2021 is probably not going to be any better for Threadripper. The reason I say that is that another monkey wrench is Threadripper Pro that is only available from OEM systems. How it compares to Ryzen 5000 is something I really haven't seen. CPU availability in 2021 is still a BIG unknown.
But yeah, building a new computer this fall / winter completely sucks. I've actually on building my 6th rig for my family -- still stuck on waiting for the CPU and GPU. I actually planned ahead a little and had a "backup plan" -- I bought a Ryzen 3600X back in Oct. so I could at least P.O.S.T. but still waiting for a Radeon RX 6800+ / RTX 3070+ GPUs to even be available sucks.
I don't see the situation changing anytime soon. :-/
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I see the 24C/48T TR 3960X [amazon.com] is actually in stock on Amazon.
Not as of 30 secs ago; it's all 3rd party sellers who want ~$2000 or more for the TR 3960X.
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If you can apply a band-aid or open a can of soup, you have the skill to build a PC or replace parts.
What's wrong with your PC that you yourself can't fix with a screwdriver and mail-order replacement parts?
workload (Score:2)
Is a gaming workload so similar to a commercial workload that a CPU optimized for spreadsheets etc. (or whatever an intel-architecture CPU is optimized for) would be optimal as a gaming platform. I would have thought that there was space in the market for a truly gaming focused CPU.
If the argument is that the CPU is just a gateway to the GPU then perhaps it does not matter
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The conventional wisdom for gaming is to take four of the fastest cores you can get, over eight slightly slower ones. That is definitely going to hurt on the productivity side.
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They're all fast enough it won't matter. The only hard part is for those players who demand super high frames per second on details environments, and that's where the high end GPUs show up. But it's not required. You can play most games on lower settings. The main CPU where it matters is mostly about the physics engine and getting data back and forth to the GPU as fast as possible. I found that extra memory helped much more than other upgrades, as you can cache more textures instead of resorting to goin
Not sure about that (Score:3, Insightful)
The Core i7-9700K has fallen to $269, for example, and it's still one of Intel's fastest gaming CPUs. At that price, paired with a Z370 motherboard, you could build a gaming-focused system, so long as you don't actually need ....
To game?
I mean, how many compromise components are you going to buy on the cheap before you are not really making a gaming PC anymore and should just buy a new Xbox?
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*snicker* He thinks that you can just go out and buy a new Xbox.
Xbox S/X can be had, for a price. (Score:3)
*snicker* He thinks that you can just go out and buy a new Xbox.
I know how hard they are to get retail at the moment...
However, I can buy an Xbox One S on Ebay right now for $400. Wouldn't that be a lot easier than building out a whole gaming PC? It's less than a really good graphics card...
The One X (on Ebay again) is $800, pretty pricy (compared to retail) but still cheaper than building a good gaming PC by a pretty wide margin.
I know that PC gaming it giving you a wider set of things you can do, but pro
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Wait, Xbox is the compromise. Lower performance, limited games, idiotic controller, etc. A gaming PC does not need to be high end and you don't need to join the master race for it, but a moderate PC with a moderate graphics card still is a better way to play most of the games I like than any console could hope to be. I can play games from 20 years ago all the way up to new games.
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Well, if I get a new gaming PC, I can play my existing games on it. If I get an xbox, I have to buy all new games.
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Actually, since the article mentioned that CPU and then went straight to the i7-10700k, completely omitting the i5-10600K, makes me thing that they're rather incompetent at what they're think they're doing.
The i5-10600k is a quite capable CPU for gaming with its 12 threads and good overclocking capabilities. The boxed KF model, without the iGPU, comes at a price of around 220€ here in Germany. And you can
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At least to me, high end does imply that they're going to play at a considerably high resolution, something like 2160p.
And being aware of all the major computer hardware reviewers that are out there and having watched the results of their benchmarks I know that at those resolutions the realtime performance bottleneck is pretty much always the GPU in gaming. You are NOT going to hamstring the system unless you use a really crappy old CPU. That is absolute bullshit.
H
Shutdowns break supply chains? Who knew! (Score:2)
This is why anyone with half a brain was telling people back in March, "If you're looking to buy a new computer, do it now". These kinds of disruptions to the supply chain were practically inevitable.
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Well indeed. Not to mention the extra fact that this happens over every christmas period anyway. Post christ mas it will go down. Maybe not to normal but not to madness levels.
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...except the next gen stuff wasn't available then.
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Yet the advice was "buy anyhow, the next generation will probably be delayed". Paper launches with near-zero availability count.
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Hardly paper launches. I'm typing this on a PC running a 10900K and an nVidia 3090 RTX, both that I got near launch day.
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radio shack should sold pc parts.
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There was a time when RS was actually good. Way back in the before-time when they were mostly staffed with retired engineers and EE majors.
The first time I went into an RS and asked where the enameled wire was and the sales person gave me the "what's that" deer in the headlights look, I knew they were heading for a crash.
Fortunately, the web came along and it's easy to order parts now.
New titles (Score:2)
I guess the "good" news is that game makers aren't releasing a lot of new titles due to the pandemic anyway. It's going slow all round.
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Clearly the demand is up because of covid, and everyone staying at home.
TFA says what but not why (Score:2)
This is useful information. I'm not a gamer, but I use a high end GPU for acceleration of Adobe products. I'm currently experiencing the Nvidia "black screen" problem and am considering a different GPU. But it appears, now is not the time to buy. That's unfortunate.
But besides the practical information, there's no indication of why this is happening, except for a comment that blames it on people being sequestered due to COVID. Is that the reason?
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As for why, it's kind of a combination of issues. Pent up deman
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Thanks for the insight. So, basically, hold off for now. Photoshop and Lightroom are key to my business, and the performance increase using GPU acceleration is key. It's frustrating to have the card fail two or three times a day but if you're getting crashes with the 3070, maybe upgrading isn't going to help.
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The really frustrating part is I can not get it to create a
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In specifically your scenario ( Photoshop and Lightroom), you shouldn't be worrying half so much about GPU compute performance, but instead worrying a whole lot more about the amount of RAM your GPU has on board.
Almost certainly the reason his 3070 is crashing is exactly because it doesn't have enough ram on board for heavy-duty productivity tasks. That's exactly the market that the 3090 was built to address.
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In specifically your scenario ( Photoshop and Lightroom), you shouldn't be worrying half so much about GPU compute performance, but instead worrying a whole lot more about the amount of RAM your GPU has on board.
Almost certainly the reason his 3070 is crashing is exactly because it doesn't have enough ram on board for heavy-duty productivity tasks. That's exactly the market that the 3090 was built to address.
Now that is extremely interesting. In adapter properties, it shows 2 gigs of dedicated video memory but 30 gigs of "total available graphics memory", which tells me it's borrowing system memory somehow. (I have 56 GB installed.)
Afterburner shows me constantly hovering around 1870 to 1920 memory usage, with occasional spikes up to 2000 when I do certain operations. I can well believe that it's sometimes spiking over 2048 if I'm doing something GPU intensive. The "total available graphics memory" implies
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Jesus (Score:2, Flamebait)
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THink how much better your reflexes and situational awareness would be if you had a 4k 140hz ultrawide monitor and a GPU that can keep it maxxed out. That blurry pixel now is clearly a distant enemy sniper and you have more time to respond.
Nvidia has a study showing that with pro-level gamers, just fractions of a single frame can make a real difference.
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I can't tell if you're serious. Of course Nvidia would conduct all sorts of tests, wait for favorable results, and then only publish those results. That's not a study, it's marketing. A single "blurry pixel" in 1080p is too small for a human to see. It doesn't matter if you turn it into several smaller pixels and make the monitor wrap around your head.
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1080p is "good enough", 1440p is great. 90 frames per minute is pretty bad though, you might want to upgrade from Intel integrated graphics.
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I am no longer a gamer, but I was thinking something along the same lines. Most gamers go way overboard on their hardware. They act like they need a computer capable of simulating the whole universe just to play a computer game. It also really doesn't matter what CPU you have. AMD may be running circles around Intel, but I find it hard to believe that there's a game out there that an i7/i9 can't handle. Games tax GPUs, not CPUs.
The whole frames per second thing is another crock of shit. There's a reason mov
i5-9600 for ~$200 (Score:3)
Not the fastest, must-have chip, but you can get an i5-9600 for ~$200 or so and when it comes to bang for the buck it's way up there.
Not the thing for high-end gaming but it'll hold its own in almost any other use case.
(I feel bad for gamers because all the crypto miners are sucking up all the hot new cards, but you libertarians should jump for joy because it's the Free Market at work, right boys? I mean, if you can't get the card you want then you should be overjoyed to see that raw, unfettered capitalism in action!)
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Are they really still buying nVidia cards for mining? I remember hearing years ago that you needed purpose-built hardware to make more than you spend on electricity, at least for BTC.
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yea, the video card manufactures started making mining only videe cards like this one https://www.amazon.com/EVGA-P1... [amazon.com] without video output, cables, etc.
It's suppose to be a bit cheaper than the normal graphic. But output is limited by chip anyways
Power Trends (Score:2)
nVidia's 3090 GPU puts out an outrageously high 350W in default form, but 3rd party partners have already released variants that draw 400+ [The EMTEK 3090 is rated at 410W, for example]. For years now, nVidia have offered, broadly speaking, two power points: either something
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3rd party partners have already released variants that draw 400+ [The EMTEK 3090 is rated at 410W, for example].
Think of all the money you'll save on heating in the winter though.
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You're apparently joking but this is actually a thing for me.
In the winter, when I'm working/playing in my small office with the door shut, I don't need the house heating on nearly as much to stay comfortably warm.
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Same here....my office is nice and cozy at ~74 and the rest of the house is 65 degrees, all from a couple of PCs and a floor lamp.
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I truly don't understand why people are so up in arms about an extra 100W here or there...
Do the math, the actual yearly increase in running costs is trivial, especially if you express it as a fraction of the cost of what you spent on the new CPU or GPU.
Just do like I did about 8 years ago, invest in a 1200W PSU and never worry again.
This is me (Score:2)
PC gaming. (Score:2)
I thought everybody gave that up with the most recent set of consoles. Are there any compelling titles that make it worth it and aren't available w/o a PC?
Is the experience that much better?
I am actually asking because.
I Gave up Gaming 15 years ago so I'm really wondering. It looked like something on it's way out @ the time.
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Serious strategy games like Civ 5/6, Cities: Skylines, and XCOM 2 are my main reason for it. Some of them are available on console, but there's no way I'd attempt to play something like that without a mouse and keyboard. Shooter are of course better with mouse and keyboard, but for some reason people seem to love playing them on joysticks.
There's also the CRPG genre which is, unfortunately, on its deathbed. Series like Wasteland, Dragon Age, Pillars of Eternity, arguably Mass Effect, were highlights of the
Why don't the retailers stop the scalpers? (Score:2)
Why don't retail stores (online and physical) act to stop scalpers from acquiring all the good stuff? Surely its not in their interests if scalpers buy everything...
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Because the scalpers are actually buying them from said stores, at least the nVidia 3090RTXs.
In the USA , nVidia -branded 3090's are literally only available from Best Buy. Their website has been dragging it's ass for months because the scalpers have bots that are pinging it solidly to be the first when stock because avaialble, because Best-Buy remain too stupid to just implement a preorder queue.
On best buy they're $1499, on ebay they're actually selling around $2100+. I figure the scalpers are netting may
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This also greatly increases the odds any warranty issues will be taken directly to the manufacturer, rather than back to the retailer, because the retailer may be a long way from the end user. For them, selling something is nice. Being able to close the books on it almost immediately after the sale looks even better on the balance sheet.
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The problem the retail stores face is that if the scalper can't scalp the product for a profit, then they try return it to the retailer for a refund. So the scalper gets the profit, and the retailer gets to take the risk.
GPU situation is far worse ... (Score:2)
Radeon 6000 GPUs and RTX 3000 GPUs are both almost impossible to find, and the older, slower, and less feature-rich cards that you can buy are almost all selling for more today than they were six months ago.
The GPU situation is far worse than that, at least in Southern California. On the NVIDIA side the are no 3000 series, 2000 series nor many 1000 series cards available. At a local Microcenter, a pretty good electronics store, all they have are 1030.
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Or blame AMD for selling off what became TSMC, although they were in such dire financial straits at the time it's not really like they had a choice.
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Much like in any other industry, the companies themselves don't much care about scalpers. They still get to make their money. The best you can hope for is the scalpers are dumb enough to hold onto stock far beyond the useful life and get jammed for it. If scalping stops being profitable, the scalpers will stop scalping.
That's clearly not the case currently. It's rampant in several of my hobbies currently. PC parts, game systems, certain action figure markets, etc.
Re:The industry needs to get scalpers under contro (Score:5, Interesting)
It will eventually settle out somewhat as stock levels rise and demand tappers off after the holidays, but now that the scalpers have a taste for it, it's going to be an ongoing problem for the foreseeable future. We need retailers to invest in anti-bot technology but a) that's a escalation game and b) they actually need to care enough to spend money on it. Hell just offering a queuing option like Apple does, where you place your order and get in line to receive the product when it's your turn would go a long way in discouraging it. Unfortunately the vast majority of retailers don't offer this.
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They should care. It would be a huge win for the authorized sellers if they had some variety of Dutch auction, where resellers were somehow blocked and the sellers could capture even 10% or 20% of the premiums that scalpers currently gain. In lieu of that, I'm going to just wait until I can readily buy directly from an authorized seller.
Blocking the resellers is currently a "magic happens" box, unfortunately....
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They actually do in this one though, because of lessons learned from bitcoin boom. When boom ended both nvidia and AMD had very large stocks of cards they couldn't sell. It hit stock prices in a meaningful way when they announced it.
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Best response to scalpers is to not buy product at inflated prices.
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Best response to scalpers is to not buy product at inflated prices.
This is the true answer, but unfortunately it's just not the reality. I certainly would not pay 2x retail for a console or GPU, but far too many people will it seems.
Re: (Score:2)
The scalpers often don't make money. e.g. they get stuck with product they can't sell. But it takes them a long time to admit that and dump stock
The problem with that is if they are smart, they don't get stuck with stock. If they can't flip it right away, they can usually just return it for a refund. If they manage to get it from a retailer with a generous return policy, they don't even have to worry about things like restocking fees. Get it from a retailer (Walmart, Target, BB, etc) with a physical presence, they don't even have to ship it back. And even if they don't, for a lot of stuff they can still unload it at cost, tack on some profit to the
Re: (Score:3)
The best way to get middleman arbitrage under control, no matter what the physical product is, is to produce a supply that is slightly greater than demand.
Nobody buys from scalpers if they can just go to a retail organization that stands behind the transaction with return and warranty support.