Hacker News Reader

Comment by baldfat | Hacker News Reader

I can't get a mid level graphics card either. These cards in the article are $200 and $250 cards from AMD. They are going for over $400.

I am the person that buys $200 graphic cards and high end is $500+ like a 1080ti or some sort of Titan. I always thought that $200 was the sweet spot with the best price to performance ratio. I can't buy a $200 card now.

I was lucky and got a new AMD 480 last year for $220. It sadly has an issue and needs to go in for warranty (3 years). It can only handle the simplest of graphics or it hangs and freezes the computer. No big deal, I wanted to make my kids a Minecraft and coding computer and I can't buy a decent $150 card either.

RAM is also sky high and I do video editing from time to time an want at least 16 GB in my rig. That would cost $100 18 months ago and now thats $225+ also due to the miners.

View on HN

When the crash comes or when someone comes up with an ASIC for Ethereum, all these cards will flood the secondary market and the spare capacity slack will cause a price crash. You'll be able to get the highest end card in the world for half the current price.

Unless there will be no crash and/or Ethereum will be replaced by another cryptocurrency that's profitable to mine with GPU's.

> RAM is also sky high and I do video editing from time to time an want at least 16 GB in my rig. That would cost $100 18 months ago and now thats $225+ also due to the miners.

That is crazily out of whack. Back in 2011 I bought 8Gb (2x4Gb, 1333Mhz) for in my 2009 15” MBP and it cost me €25 secondhand. Worked like a champ too, even transferred it to the computer of my little brother when I upgraded to a new MacBook.

It's not that long ago I used to think of RAM as _almost_ disposable - you could max out your capacity pretty cheaply, and it wasn't really worth reselling a lot of the time. Over the past few years it seems to just been getting increasingly expensive though.

The effects on prices are quite bad, but the pendulum always comes back in the other direction two. Every GPU shortage leads to the second hand market getting flooded a few years later with used mining GPUs.

So in effect we get short term problems, but if you time your purchases correctly you can get deals too.

The problem that a few years later those GPUs aren’t worth much and with more and more coins coming out miners have always something to fallback on for their older hardware.

It doesn’t look like the GPU flood of 2015 would happen again.

Would you want to buy a piece of hardware that had been run at 100% of it's capacity for years, without any warranty?

I might. If it still works after mining for years then that tells me it'll last for a while.

Well, not everyone is aware of this, and 2nd hand mining card price points on various market platforms probably will push down the prices of everything else to varying extents. (both new, as well as 2nd hand gamer cards).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com