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Comment by teruakohatu | Hacker News Reader

I can't think if there has been a worse time to be a PC enthusiast. Everything is so hard to come by, and if you can find parts, prices are insane.

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I bought an RX580 in december for $140 on ebay.

Currently, one in the condition I have goes for $350.

My GPU purchase is out-earning Bitcoin.

This is dumb.

Just gaming enthusiast in general. Try buying latest gen console in Europe. I gave up and am now playing Rome TW port for iPad.

Yup. My gaming PC is still rocking a 3700X and an RX580 because finding stock for GPUs at close to MSRP for the high-ish or even mid range cards is near impossible. :(

Edit: and I’m in Germany which means import fees, and other things that make things a bit more expensive.

A 3700x? That’s less than two years old. We’re also in a year+ long pandemic.

I was able to buy it a while ago but I paid a bunch too much. It’s the GPU that I’m hurting to upgrade.

I'm in the same situation (even with the same CPU and GPU)

I've basically in the same situation as you - same specs, based in central europe - and the GPU situation is dire. PC components places here are completely wiped out of GPUs. The RX580 is gonna be fine-ish for me for the next wee while, but I'd like an upgrade if possible.

My gaming PC is on a fourth generation Intel with a RTX 2080. Still enough to do >100fps in the games I play on 1440p.

I was looking at even a 1080ti and they’re > 500 euros here in Germany! It’s ridiculous. I mean it’s an amazing GPU but it’s 2 generations old now.

In Austria even 1660s are >400 Euros. Try that for insane.

1080TI was one of nvidia's "mistakes" as it was ahead of its time in performance and VRAM size and was one of the reasons people owning it could afford to skip the overpriced RTX20X0 series and even the RTX30X0 series. That's why they held up in value so well, even before the pandemic shortages.

True. It really is a special card. Good thing is, at least for me, I don’t need a new GPU I’d just like one for higher fidelity in games.

I could sell my 1060 6GB for roughly same price I've bought it back in 2016.

This situation has convinced me to buy a completely new system when prices come down again and use the old one as a server/backup.

Yeah if you've had a "ship of theseus" pc for a while it seems like a complete rebuild every 5 years is usually reasonable to prevent any component bottlenecking you too much

Worst time so far. The problems will only increase because PC will become a small niche item for enthusiast not a common item.

Also there are potential problems with x86 pc's not being able to match ssd->gpu streaming speeds of custom architecture consoles.

That's not an x86 bottleneck as Microsoft is bringing the tech to PC[1], and best part, it even works on Gen 3 SSDs so you don't have to burn $ on top of the line Gen 4 drives.

[1]https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/microsoft-to-share-more-de...

Look at slide 5 — they are still using system memory instead of reading directly to gpu. Although ms rep did say that direct streaming is being worked on[1]. Also we still don't know details on nvidia's proprietary rxt-io. But I wouldn't call that solved. [1] — https://imgur.com/a/fHnLLQo

It's the same story every generation. There may be some things the consoles are better at right now but give it 2 years and we'll be complaining how the consoles are holding things back again.

Yup. PCs will mostly move into 1970s hobbyist territory but nowadays you can't build 5nm chips in your garage.

Well, not all of them, since a ton of professionals use them, but some niches like PC gaming will feel a bit like that very soon, compared to mobile gaming.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/292751/mobile-gaming-rev...

(and the trend is for mobile games to become much bigger much faster than desktop games)

Ah yes the 5nm chip hobby scene from the 70s :)

I suspect the hobby scene will be like what I see from my friend who hacks keyboards, special mod-able components. There's advantages for when a product is designed on hobby merit, and I think it'll be a longer bastion of enthusiasm.

PC gaming isn't niche. In the past few years it feels far more mainstream then it ever has before. You underestimate that there's literally a generation which has grown up on Twitch and YouTube where people predominantly play games on PC.

Sure mobile gaming is massive. But considering the current growth of PC gaming it's hardly something that negates the existence of PC gaming even if it's smaller in comparison.

I've been playing PC games since 1998 and I've played them exclusively until 2018.

They heyday of PC games from a market share perspective was in the past (probably around 2005?). At the time there were just PCs and console, I think they were reasonably close.

Now desktop games are less than a third and they will probably be around one fifth or less within a decade.

That doesn't mean that they will be bad, the overall PC game market value will grow, it's just that the mobile game market will grow much faster and become much, much bigger over time.

Mobile gaming is surely huge and growing. But I don't see how it has much bearing on the health of PC gaming. It's not a zero-sum game. I can buy that PC and Console gaming are in competition but the gaming experience between mobile and PC/Console is vastly different.

Game streaming will become more common, so people won't buy PCs but rent games to play on the cloud.

How? Sales are rising right now. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/12/pc-market-had-best-q1-since-...

You underestimate pc gaming.

You can buy a pre-built gaming PC with a Nvidia 3080 today and have it delivered by the end of the week. The shortage exists exclusively on the retail side, OEMs are awash with both graphics cards and CPUs.

This is not true. Every major prebuilt company has significant delays on 3080s and 3090s. I just checked.

ibuypower: 6 weeks

nzxt: 4 weeks

originpc: 4 weeks

maingear: 12 weeks

alienware: 5 weeks

I think you forgot to check the actual majors Dell, HP/Omen, and Lenovo/Legion but maybe they're just as bad.

Alienware = dell for the top end stuff like 3090s.

And to that end: https://i.imgur.com/oXgofp7.png

I just went this route to build a ML workstation. I was able to get a prebuilt with a 3090 for ~30% of a comparable build on https://lambdalabs.com/.

Now I just need to wait until next year to get the second 3090. I considered waiting for the new A4000s to launch to see if they'd have better inventory but figured 3090s have additional value as a gaming gpu.

I'd be curious how professional ML folks are fairing and what they're using -- it's not too late to cancel my build.

AWS GPU compute is pretty cheap if you don't need their newest beefiest rigs.

I've prototype on a collab notebook and have been using AWS GPUs for training. Having to jump through hoops for quota and the general anxiety in trying to optimize the costs led me to just build a machine with a 1-time upfront cost. As a sole proprietor, I can write off the capex against future revenue anyways and depreciate it.

Just got this delivered yesterday:

https://www.novatech.co.uk/savedbuild/ccf0fcec-685d-4f4b-8be...

New to ML but looks similar enough to some of the builds on your site that I’m slightly less scared that I made the wrong choice!

Dope, 7 days is a pretty nice turnaround. I went with a 'custom' prebuilt so I could plan for adding additional cards once they're well supplied. You might run into trouble with the PSU, case clearance and mobo throughput if you plan on adding another 3-slot 3090 - those are all sub-1k though so you can always swap once you need to!

Alienware's published lead time should be taken with a large grain of salt. My 3090RTX / Ryzen 5600X build just shipped 12 days after I ordered it, a full 3 weeks faster than the estimate I was given at the time that I ordered it.

We just bought 20 Dell Prevision workstations with 3080’s in them and they were delivered fine with no question about availability for more.

(In Sweden)

Sure, but now you are stuck with un-upgradeable FCLGA3647 systems.

That’s what I did, a lot of the smaller pre-build retailers are out of stock but HP/Dell/etc. still have the high end cards in reasonably priced builds.

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