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Comment by laputan_machine | Hacker News Reader

My PC is 11 years old this year. I've been waiting to upgrade it for 2 years but held off because GPU prices are utterly ridiculous.

I don't know who can afford these inflated prices, I was hoping things would settle but it doesn't appear to be the case.

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"I was hoping things would settle but it doesn't appear to be the case."

I've come to the conclusion that it's not going to 'settle' for a long time. Not until competition arrives from new foundries (several years out, although they _are_ being planned and built) and competition from Intel and their GPU platform appears and eventually becomes competitive. So your wait will be a couple years longer.

Proof Of Stake with Ethereum won't change anything. There are many other POW block chains around and people invested in GPUs farming will migrate, find profit and continue indulging their livelihoods. COVID isn't going away and isn't really causing any of this to begin with; it's just the go-to excuse for every complaint.

The real problem is obvious to me; the manufacturers, particularly those in Western countries, have been on a 20 year long lemming-like off-shoring race to Taiwan and S. Korea foundries and now there is a foundry oligopoly and competition no longer exists. Prices go up. Big surprise. And it won't return to 'normal' anytime soon.

With that in mind I bit the bullet ordered up all the parts for my new machine two weeks ago; $3k with a 3070 TI GPU. About a week after my order the the exact same GPU appeared in stock from the exact same reseller with a $200 price hike. The prices aren't going down. They're going up.

Apple’s move, a decade ago, to control their own silicon seems quite prescient.

They have their own chip designs, but the manufacturing is done by TSMC.

Indeed, but they control the supply chain risks to a much greater extent now.

Very true. But they have hedged that very well with long-term contracts, so they are effectively first in line for most of their needs. I would guess that this is still biting them on some components (they have so many in so many products), but they appear to be riding through this pretty well.

Well they certainly weren't going to be able to fabricate their own Intel chips, that's for sure! Baby steps, my friends.

(Not that it's in any way fair to call "design your own chip" a baby step haha.)

Everybody saw Intel slacking off a decade ago including Apple and Google but Google didn't have the guts to start their own CPU design Department despite being the #5 largest computer maker on Earth!

Update: that GPU is about $250 more now than what I paid on 8/6.

The worst part of all of this is now my PC is this precious asset. Used to be a GPU could die and "meh, whatever... could have used an update anyhow." Now I feel the need to pay for a 'protection' plan.

The good part of just paying the cost is now I'm no longer involved in 'newegg shuffle' nonsense or participating in 24/7 Live Stock Watcher videos on YouTube[1]. How messed up is that?

[1] 24/7 Live stock alert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfyJ5XBchoQ

There are many PoW coins other than ETH, but is those price keep high? I think why ETH price high is it's widely used and funtional.

Miners care about profits; how much money can they 'earn' over time. The actual price of the 'coin' is only a factor in that equation.

A modest new desktop will be definitively much better than anything you could have had 11 years ago.

Unless you are looking for high-end gaming, the most important parts will be your motherboard and SSD (nvme) speed. You could get all high-end components except for the graphic card, and just wait it out and replace it later when the prices come back.

Try finding a PC starter bundle that includes a gpu from GameStop or some other retailer and you can find one for MSRP. The trade off is you’re buying other PC parts you may not need, for example a PSU.

Consider a pre-build PC, and then a Steam Deck or Xbox for gaming?

Onboard graphic is pretty good these days, unless you plan to game high-end stuff. I'm actually using my 4790k's onboard graphic (2014) as a daily driver since I use my GPUs for compute only.

Why not just purchase a used one on eBay?

My current GPU is a used 980, it's mostly ok but it makes noises when doing certain tasks for some reason (like scrolling a browser window), I'm really not sure what causes it but it's put me off buying second hand cards, if it fails there's not much you can do to fix it

I use 980Ti too - i'm lighting 6 candles on the cake this year...It keeps me warm at night and during the winter. I am surprised it's still working after 6 years of daily use with that TDP and heat released.

My 970 is still limping along... kinda hilarious that it's paired with a 5950x in my new workstation. I'm impressed it can still play modern games pretty decently on my 1440p monitor although usually I've gotta dial it down to medium gfx settings.

Gonna try to hold out till next gen, crossing my fingers supply issues have been sorted out by then.

I’m running an RX 470, since I upgraded one of my monitors to QHD, it has been having some issues. Luckily, I hate action games, don’t care much about high-end graphics, and grew up with 30 FPS as target ;)

Some day I’ll be able to upgrade to a new budget GPU.

It’s just coil whine, not really worth worrying about. Happens on many graphics cards even when brand new.

I've just looked this up and it's exactly that noise, at least I know what it is now, thanks.

Noises? As in fan noises or GPU/VRM/component noises?

If it's the former, repaste it and grease the fan, if it's the latter, it's normal (except when caused by overheating, in which case repaste/grease).

Prices for used GPUs are also inflated, though I think they have started to come down a bit. Once Ethereum moves to proof-of-stake (early 2022?) the market will probably get flooded with used GPUs.

I’m saving up for the flood of old GPUs. I can finally realize my dream of taking all my ML work off the cloud once I scoop up some old mining GPUs for relatively cheap

You really may be waiting a good while. And if a desirable used model is ever a decent price, it’ll be a unit burnt out from mining fake money that’s only used to buy real money or a mail order of LSD.

Mining usually does not "burn out" a GPU. Most miners cool their cards adequately and undervolt them. If a GPU is somehow damaged from mining then it’s typically observable - it either does not work or it artifacts quickly, making it easy to detect and avoid.

Even if they do that, they’re still running it 24/7/365 for possibly years at a time. Wouldn’t that be some serious wear and tear? Genuine question - I have no clue.

Most of the wear and tear on a GPU is going to come from temperature changes due to the workload changing, or, for the fans, the card spinning the fans at start up, ramping up and ramping down due to a change in load, or halting the fans at shutdown.

It's very possible that an undervolted, well-ventilated card, run with a steady workload 24/7/365 for three years would have _less_ wear and tear than a card used for gaming and then shut down every night for three years.

Miners will probably move to Ethereum classic.

If many miners move to another cryptocurrency, the difficulty for that network will go up, to the point that it's no longer profitable to mine it (electricity costs exceed income). Unless the price for the cryptocurrency goes up as well, but it won't magically do that just because of an influx of miners. After all, those other networks don't have the utility that Ethereum has.

Ethereum Classic will probably be 500 dollar at the end of this bull run. It will be worth it for miners.

This. I have a gut feeling that a lot of mining rigs were bought with credit and haven’t paid for themselves yet. Those rigs will find a new asset to mine rather than being dumped. Outlawing mining is the only thing I see that causes prices to move downward

Like how China banned it in May, and it has been creeping back? You can't ban mining. At least not in any jurisdiction with free speech type laws. Be careful what you are asking for -- the ability to run arbitrary software should not be controlled by governments.

I don't think proof-of-stake will actually work. Not because of any technical reasons, but because 95% of the people involved in crypto just see it as a free money printing machine. Once their hardware is no longer useful for mining, they will just move to some other proof-of-work crypto.

It's incredibly unfortunate that Bitcoin and similar proof-of-work currencies blew up and remained hot commodities. Because I do think that cryptocurrency is abstractly a very exciting idea, but the popular implementations are fundamentally abysmal.

If proof-of-stake works out, particularly as a currency people can actually use, then maybe nobody wants to buy Bitcoin anymore and the whole thing dries up as only speculators are left.

Just to be clear, Bitcoin isn't creating any GPU demand now; mining ASICs are too good. Ethereum is also becoming ASIC-dominated, but being scrypt-based reduces the ASIC advantage.

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