First off, don’t bother. Unless you need one (unlikely) and even if you really want one (more likely) the price of a GPU vs the retail price is just lunacy.
But why is that the case? And why would retail price ever actually decide the value of an item (it doesn’t).
An interesting dynamic has started to take form. GPUs were generally a depreciating asset. You’d buy a GPU, and soon after a new one would arrive on the market and yours would be worthless.
This is no longer the case. 2+ years ago I bought a Geforce 1070 ti for around $250. It’s now selling consistently on eBay for $400.
Current NVIDIA and AMD cards are going for approximately twice retail. How can this be happening? A few theories:
- Covid supply chain logistics. Apple may be infinitely more capable than NVIDIA at supply chain (I don’t remember waiting long or paying extra for any apple gear in the last year), or other market dynamics are at play as well.
- Covid is forcing everyone home— and gaming is an indoor activity one can do in quarantine. The demand for games, video cards to play games with, and general home entertainment is at an all time high.
- The market has realized GPUs can make you money. This is the big one. You can buy a card, and when you aren’t using it, it makes you money. Overlock it. Makes you even more money. At small scale it’s a solid low profit side hustle. At high scale it’s a way to walk away from a career.
Ethereum is the current to go for using a GPU to fund your hardware habit and provide a (somewhat rational) justification for ownership. There are resources all over the internet that explain this in better detail.
So what does this mean for the prospective GPU buyer? You’ll either not be buying for the foreseeable future, or you are going to pay market value— not retail.
My old 1070ti is now cranking out ethereum at about $2 (31MH/s). If this means nothing to you, that’s fine. Just know even when I account for power consumption, the monthly cost of ownership on this card is -$50 a month. It makes me money.
I’m upgrading to an RTX 3070 I picked up on ebay. The thought is to run dual GPUs in my PC and average $140 a month. This allows me to rationalize the expense to myself and generate enough in revenue to make me consider expanding.
This is a new rule of hardware economics: the value of performance is no longer defined by personal need— the hardware you own can provide enough value to the outside world to pay for itself.
-Andy
