High end 3D cards for rendering out of stock

Looks like everyone is getting on the crypto currency mining bandwagon since looking at NVIDIA’s site almost all their cards are out of stock. That or is something going on that I’m not aware of?

I don’t think it’s just you, the nearest Best Buy to our house barely has any Nvidia GPU’s on the shelves (though there was a decent number of Radeon Polaris cards).

Bitcoin has since become much harder to mine, but new currencies are popping up like dandelions and people are switching to those. It also doesn’t help that many have managed high valuations (even Dogecoins are booming despite them meaning to be a joke).

I assume that production in this area is intentionally kept low to keep demand (price) high as it can be… (Intel did it half a year ago pulling much of it’s stuff out of stores, nvidia also stepped in) & it’s now become obvious. Same as with other parts DDR4, SSD… fuel, diamonds, cars… Basically it’s the Industry 4.0 in full go. You just have to pre-order :wink:

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Well, considering economics and efficiency this is simply market optimization & hopefully not abuse of power & manipulation. The real economists knew long before about cryptocurrencies and democratization (in high-tech market areas) soon to be in bloom.

The shortages are due to a combination of high demand and supply not rising fast enough to meet it. Do keep in mind that companies have plenty of reason to not open a bunch of new factories and produce product in much larger quantities (an incoming lull in demand could cause prices to crash and send said companies into deep financial pain, as manufacturing computer hardware is not cheap). Their high profits right now also play the part of creating a financial cushion for that next downturn.

In terms of RAM, there was once a major downturn in pricing (a long time ago) that caused a manufacturer to go bankrupt. We are lucky to not see the same happen in the last cycle or prices would be worse.

AMD isn’t making money on this though as they’re not the ones inflating the prices. Retailers and resellers are blowing the prices up because the crypto miners are paying it.

1-3 year old cards are going for ridiculous prices right now. I could flip my 380x for around four times what I bought it for (I bought it for I think 200 last year. I’ve seen ebay listings for the same model at $700+). A 4 gig 570 that’s selling for ~300 at Fry’s is going for ~550 on newegg. And newegg is taking a lot of their stock and selling it as six packs for 4-5 grand instead of as individual cards at MSRP (plus a reasonable markup). It’s completely absurd.

Wow you are correct. All sold out on loads of sites I visit for parts too. Maybe I should have accepted that mining cluster invite last month!

I’m still seeing what I would consider “reasonable” stocks of NVidia-based cards at my normal source. The very-high-end ones, such as 1070Ti, 1080, and 1080Ti based ones are either out of stock or low stock, however the normal demand for those would be low in the first place so they wouldn’t be sitting on large stocks.

I have to wonder how many of these mini-miners have actually done the budget legwork to see if they’re actually breaking even?

Using an app I wrote I set a watch on the NVidia page for the 1070 Ti (£419) to alert me when it came back in stock.

A few mins ago and BOOM, I get an alert pop up, they are in stock as I write this and I bagged one. Will help as a secondary GPU render card and good price as everywhere else sells them for £100 more.

Good news, GPU prices might start going down to MSRP if this continues.

Bitcoin is below 10K and other coins have lost two-thirds of their value (turning mining rigs into money sinks). This could end up flooding the market with used GPU’s as the miners sell off their hardware to recover some costs.

That’s assuming they aren’t going to keep chasing it to try to get their investment back. Budgets are important, but few people actually work the numbers.

Bigger production means more cards to support/service. And with GPU cards used for mining, I bet they will be a lot of burn out cards still having the producer’s warranty on the secondary market. That can be a big problem for manufacturers. The Intel bug is not helping either, more people are interested now in GPU rendering because of that.