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Anyone just given up on looking for a new GPU?

It will just never feel normal to talk of GPU prices as high as they are. GPUs as part of a build used to be about maybe 30% the cost of a new PC decent custom build. On an £800 build that's £240. I remember seeing the top end GPUs on OCUK years ago and almost laughing at what kind of person would spend £500+ on a GPU. Well in 2021 it's pretty much the cheapest you might pay if you are lucky.

I have people actually asking me to do builds for them and those which need a new PC as their's is over a decade old. I have to explain the GPU shortage to them and basically to maybe hold out till 2022. When you talk of GPUs costing more than an entire new gen console it does feel like this is going to massively damage PC gaming going into the future as it becomes a past time only for the wealthy.

This extends to any PC component. If any single part goes abnormally past the expected and historical ratio make up of the entire comprised build, it does psychologically become a blocker for anyone buying. i.e. If motherboards suddenly became £400 for base models.
 
PrincessFrosty said:
Well you have to understand in some sense the problem with this scenario is that Nvidia has price fixed the FE cards which otherwise in a free market would be priced higher. The problem with scalping is that there isn't really such a thing. There are markets where trade happens, there are goods and services for sale and there are buyers. And the value of any specific good or service is merely where the supply and demand curves meet, if you happen to have low supply for some reason and high demand then the value is going to be very high. That's completely normal and how normal healthy markets work.

To say something is scalping is to say that it's priced above, or even significantly above what is ought to be priced at, and the problem is there's simply no objective way to say what something ought to be priced at, other than letting people compete for it in a voluntary market where participation in the exchange is voluntary and see what prices people settle on. This is why people need to stop projecting what they "feel" is the right price, you're projecting a subjective feeling for which there is basically no justification.

No one is forced into trade in a free market, it's completely voluntary and so empathy just doesn't really apply. Besides empathy typically scales with how close you are emotionally to other people. You have a lot of empathy for family and partners, a bit less so for friends and colleagues, a bit less for members of your local community, then less for people in your county and even less for someone 500 miles away, and by the time you get to people in India or China where tens of thousands of people die every day you basically could not care less. And so trade on more or less a national or global scale has got noting to do with empathy. If I pass on hardware to close friends I'll often do it either for free or massively reduced cost, I just gave one of my 1080's to a friend for nothing despite them going for ~350-400 on ebay. But if I sold one on ebay i'd get as much for it as possible.

The problem isn't scalping, it's a mistaken belief that there's a price at which something ought to be sold at, which you arrive at because of how you feel. The price fixing that Nvidia do has ulterior motives behind it, it's not out of their pure generosity they do that, it's because there's ancillary benefits for things like marketing, it's already known that the FEs struggle to even break a profit. It's why the supply of them is always very low.
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Nah, Nvidia sell at that fixed price because they are already making serious levels of profit. The most they have ever made!

Scalpers are simply scum, they are buying out products and selling them for 3 times what they paid for it. When pandemic started you had scalpers , scalping toilet paper ffs!:D Tell me that a pack of that cost £20. They were at it with the hand gel and then on to PS5s and so on.
 
Jamie Medford said:
Anyone feel like OC has more stock over the last couple of weeks? But prices are still too high for me to justify a 3070/80, thats 2 xbox series x.
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They sold practically no cards at all for a long time, so I assume they've been building up stock for a while and have now have enough to make it worth releasing some. Hence the MM deals this week too.
 
Sarge2255 said:
Nah, Nvidia sell at that fixed price because they are already making serious levels of profit. The most they have ever made!

Scalpers are simply scum, they are buying out products and selling them for 3 times what they paid for it. When pandemic started you had scalpers , scalping toilet paper ffs!:D Tell me that a pack of that cost £20. They were at it with the hand gel and then on to PS5s and so on.
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Yeah but not off FEs because so few of them are sold, they make most of their profit selling the GPU/memory kits to AIBs. I don't think you know how businesses work if you think they "well that's enough profit for today, let's sell a bunch of stuff at cost for fun!" that's just not how things work. They sell a limited run of FEs because it severse a specific set of functions for the business regarding marketing and their perception which in turn generates more profit.

If they're buying products for cheap and marking them up it's because the stores selling them cheap are not responding to market incentives. In the case of toilet paper shortage that was almost certainly because it happened in like 24 hours and there wasn't chance to respond to it. PS5's are another example of price fixing although it's done for a different reason.

The business model of the consoles is to sell the hardware at roughly cost (or a loss sometimes) to get as many units into as many homes as possible so their playerbase is as big as possible. And then make the actual profit through game royalties which they charge to devs wanting to use their platform, and which those devs pass onto consumers in elevated console prices. It's why console games cost more than the PC equivalent. If the consoles weren't price fixed by their manufacturers then they'd simply be selling the market rate in the retail stores and scalping wouldn't exist. You can only scalp in a market which has mechanisms to enforce prices lower than market rate.

A pack of toilet paper, or a ps5, or a 3080 or a marsbar or your grandmothers dentures are worth whatever someone is willing to pay for them no more, no less. The only problem here is the artificial imposition of what people think things should sell for.
 
Aretak said:
They sold practically no cards at all for a long time, so I assume they've been building up stock for a while and have now have enough to make it worth releasing some. Hence the MM deals this week too.
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Not privy to the MM deals but good idea to stop scalpers. I nearly feel of my chair when i saw a 3090 for £5k then read about the MM deals.
 
ASMB said:
Bet they wouldn't still be there if mining was still as profitable as it was earlier in the year
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Agreed, people can get any card they want now.

Plenty of quality stock at OcUk. Better get stuck in as cards reduced very fast last time we were in this position. Don't hesitate to make the purchase !
 
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PrincessFrosty said:
Yeah but not off FEs because so few of them are sold, they make most of their profit selling the GPU/memory kits to AIBs. I don't think you know how businesses work if you think they "well that's enough profit for today, let's sell a bunch of stuff at cost for fun!" that's just not how things work. They sell a limited run of FEs because it severse a specific set of functions for the business regarding marketing and their perception which in turn generates more profit.

If they're buying products for cheap and marking them up it's because the stores selling them cheap are not responding to market incentives. In the case of toilet paper shortage that was almost certainly because it happened in like 24 hours and there wasn't chance to respond to it. PS5's are another example of price fixing although it's done for a different reason.

The business model of the consoles is to sell the hardware at roughly cost (or a loss sometimes) to get as many units into as many homes as possible so their playerbase is as big as possible. And then make the actual profit through game royalties which they charge to devs wanting to use their platform, and which those devs pass onto consumers in elevated console prices. It's why console games cost more than the PC equivalent. If the consoles weren't price fixed by their manufacturers then they'd simply be selling the market rate in the retail stores and scalping wouldn't exist. You can only scalp in a market which has mechanisms to enforce prices lower than market rate.

A pack of toilet paper, or a ps5, or a 3080 or a marsbar or your grandmothers dentures are worth whatever someone is willing to pay for them no more, no less. The only problem here is the artificial imposition of what people think things should sell for.
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I disagree there, what about all the other products scalped, like NIKE shoes that cost about £100, however they are being scalped for £1000+. The very same shoes cost NIKE £10 to make. Event tickets being scalped , too and much more...

You see, anything scaplers can get their hands on and ripp people off with, is on their list. They would scalp water if there was just about enough to go round.

NVIDIA make a gpu for say £200, and sell it for £650. Any product or card they sell comes with big profits.

SONY and their PS5 , I understand and while it's true they want to sell many consoles to make a profit on the games being purchased. I don't for one moment believe the lies that they tout about they are selling the console at a loss so that they can profit from software sales. You see, these companies operate on substantial profit margins. If you buy a PS5 for £500 , guaranteed it cost Sony far less to make that so there is profit in everything that is sold with a SONY logo on it. Accessories, games , controllers ,.....
 
FoxEye said:
Article seems to contradict a few people on here who were insisting mining had nothing to do with GPU shortages/prices.
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Those people mostly said, mining plays a small role in all this but mainly scalping is increasing the prices.

Cards people could not buy from stores because some scalper has them in their room. There were other types of scalpers as well. Hope they end up with big losses!:cry:

 
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