4090 concerns

[Trickle]

To buy an RTX 4090 of the same or similar model is double and more. There is no way inflation, R and D, and wafer costs justify why a GPU should cost that much. You can buy a top tier motherboard, DDR5 6000 RAM and 7000 series CPU, all combined, for half the price, or less. It makes no sense...

First off you can 'justify' any items purchase price based on if its offering something that no other competing product can do at that given moment. Elements of a Formula 1 car, the latest smart phone, clothes fashion.

A motherboard, high design cost chip and memory mixed with the R&D is precisely what the 4090 is, so the comparison with an intel build computer is very apt. Apart from your example is 1 cycle behind. Intel's manufacturing node just isn't quite as good. The DDR5 memory isn't as fast. The Nvidia motherboard isn't as big and maybe not as complex, but you are paying for a huge chunk of precisely machined expensive heavy metal. And the "top end" isn't "half the price" or less. Its exactly the same price as the Nvidia product.

As to the opening poster's complaint about price and power. The 4090's performance at lower power levels was slightly better than I was expecting. I might pick one up 2nd hand eventually to replace my 3090. If he wants a 200W card and its purely for gaming, then I'd suggest he wait to see what AMD have to offer next year. If he wanted supreme value for money, he should have picked up a £300 6700 (nonXT) last month or reference 4060ti when they became recently available again.

 

[IceWolf]

As someone else wrote previously, Jensen stated in the Nvidia earnings call that due to the 3000 series overstock they were positioning the 4000 series as a tier above in order to allow the two to co-exist until the stock sells through. They would then be in a strong position going into next year with the 4000 series.

I take this to mean that once there are no more 3000 cards sitting in warehouses then the 4000 series prices will slowly come down. Of note Jensen did not mention AMD's new Radeon series in the earnings call, but clearly they will have to adapt their prices to whatever the competition brings. The ball is then in AMD's court whether they go for market share by undercutting Nvidia (like the 5700 or earlier cards) or price parity with a meaningless £50-100 saving vs the equivalent Nvidia product whilst lacking the same raytracing performance (as they did with the 6800 and 6900).

 

[brostradamus]

As someone else wrote previously, Jensen stated in the Nvidia earnings call that due to the 3000 series overstock they were positioning the 4000 series as a tier above in order to allow the two to co-exist until the stock sells through. They would then be in a strong position going into next year with the 4000 series.

I take this to mean that once there are no more 3000 cards sitting in warehouses then the 4000 series prices will slowly come down. Of note Jensen did not mention AMD's new Radeon series in the earnings call, but clearly they will have to adapt their prices to whatever the competition brings. The ball is then in AMD's court whether they go for market share by undercutting Nvidia (like the 5700 or earlier cards) or price parity with a meaningless £50-100 saving vs the equivalent Nvidia product whilst lacking the same raytracing performance (as they did with the 6800 and 6900).

But the only caveat here is that nvidia has restarted production of rtx 30..

 

[IceWolf]

But the only caveat here is that nvidia has restarted production of rtx 30..

Well as they are significantly cheaper to produce than the 4000 cards (Samsung 8nm vs TSMC 5nm) then it makes sense for now. I cannot believe they are making more 3090 or 3090Ti cards considering how much overstock exists of these high end products. More 3080 10GB could make sense, even allowing for a price cut later to fill out the midrange. An expensive to produce 4060 or 4050 doesn't make much sense at the moment when the profit margins on the 3000 cards must be higher.