Why are graphics cards so high in price now?

The only way to efficiently mine cryptocurrency today is with an ASIC, which is essentially software written in hardware. The technology replace the compiled code with custom built logic gates that perform the the work directly along with DSP components. You can still mine the child crypto's with the DSP's on a GPU because of the lower difficulty levels, but that ship has really sailed a long time ago.

So, on topic, crypto mining was a shot of steroids for the graphics industry. The prices went through the roof. When they ran out of gas because they could not keep up with the difficulty levels, and the move to ASICs, they still want to command those premium prices, which are unjustified because they were overpriced on a nich that is no longer there.

originally posted by: markovian
its etherium minning i have 6 cards minning atm 4 r9 290 1 290x on my gamming rig

no you cant mine eth with a cpu no you cant mine eth with asic you must use a gpu ... its really profitable and i never invested a dime started with a 7970 and used my profits to expand

eth minning needs lots of fast ram gpus with less than 3gb are not used to mine and 3gb will be phased out aswell

dont ever overclock a stock card for minning infact underclocking a little is the norm ... really bad to burn out a gpu before your roi better to lose 2 mh and mine for 5 years than to gain 3 and mine for 5 months

Whats the turn around time on mining? I mean... say i spend 3000 on 1080tis or something like that, how long does it take to break even?

That break even point is the problem. In the past it was a ways off due to the cost of electricity to mine bitcoin along with the hardware cost compared to the price of the coin itself. (there are plenty of profit calculators on the web) When bitcoin hit $15,000 that ratio was a heck of a lot better so the people who could not initially justify the expense finally had a reason to do it. As long as there are new coins to mine there will be people who want to mine them looking for easy money. Which unfortunately means that decent cards are going to cost more than they should. The only bright spot is that if you have all your old cards and they still work, ebay is your friend.

a reply to: Vroomfondel

Dat avvy !!

Back on topic ...

originally posted by: badw0lf
Why crypto though, when you can buy dedicated machines for less, to do more. Hell, even usb sticks built for mining bitcoin exist. That algorithm being cpu intensive, and nothing to do with gpus.

I had an amd hd5850, at the time, a decent mid range card, but was the best for mining scrypt algorithm. I blew it up running it 24/7 overclocked so it was at 100c constantly..

Other cards that performed better didn't do the same internally, but they gamed far better. So why crypto? Seems a cop out.

I'd say it's that like high end cpu's, you are paying for a brand name, not a bit of hardware.

Mind you, since my crypto explosion, both gpu and psu rendering me to a low end set of hardware, with the mobo and cpu I got having mined crypto, I have become used to 640x480 gaming on things. nothing like cod4 rendered like minecraft..

serious too, and I busted the pcie slot on this thing, so... brutus hands.. who cares, it played the internet at 1920x1080 easily...

I don't think it's the crypto phenomenon that is causing the prices... I think it's people buying high end brand names..

just my2c.

Most crypto doesn't have ASICs available so people use GPU mining. It's really only a few coins where ASICs are required (like Bitcoin)

originally posted by: ChaoticOrder
I bought a GTX 1080 8GB card in may of last year for $700 AUD, now the exact same card seems to cost around $1000 AUD, that's pretty crazy. Honestly I'm glad I bought it when I did, I got sick of waiting for AMD to release the Vega, I thought it would be a cheaper option than the 1080 but the Vega 64 8GB card is priced around $1400 AUD, it's completely insane. I thought AMD was going to save the day and push down GPU prices but it appears that hasn't happened at all.

Go for a laptop and you can still get a decent price on a GPU. I've got 3 gaming laptops (one is for work, the other 2 are personal machines). My 1070 was $1300, my 1080 was $1900, and my alienware (overpriced) 1080TI was $2500.

originally posted by: TEOTWAWKIAIFF
Graphic cards are not just one chip. They are not even like a CPU with several cores.

They have hundreds of "cores" and directly plug into your computer. They can act independently and are the "soul" of your computer. The mining programs run faster and better on just the graphics card because it is a relatively simple program involving integers and a floating point function telling you if the integers are prime or not.

The sad fact is, computer farms are being hijacked and out performing the lone bitcoin miner. The graphic card crunch seems a little overhyped. Guess who is profiting?

One day, maybe sooner than we think, the hyped quantum computer will arrive and pgp and bitcoin evolve or die.

Sort of. More accurately, a CPU follows a general instruction set and can only do a handful of tasks in parallel. Graphics cards follow a specific instruction set (4x4 matrix multiplication to be exact) and can perform a lot of these tasks in parallel. So with properly written software that can send data to a GPU in the one format it can handle, you can get very high performance. It still pales in comparison to ASICs though which are purpose built hardware to a specific problem, but those are expensive, narrow, and hard to get.

a reply to: Vroomfondel

that is straight insane, just let me build like i used too

originally posted by: MarlbBlack
a reply to: Vroomfondel

that is straight insane, just let me build like i used too

Laptops are the budget options these days. You can't upgrade them every few months, but a good laptop will last for years.

a reply to: Aazadan

now u can actually plug ur laptop in to ur big screen>? was thinking about a lapppptop i dunno though..