Yeah, but how many? And what's the demand like? Did the gamers get them or the bots? Also never mind that most countries don't even get FE drops.
Not sure I get you, unless you think you have a guaranteed shot at snagging a card at MSRP whenever you want?
I get what people are miffed about, but I'm trying to offer a different perspective on things.
Yeah, but I'm thinking more about the much more aggressive inflation that's going on in the past 12 months and onwards than the historical norm of the last 10 years, which had it quite low overall. Plus like I've said the continuous price increases as a result of R&D requiring more capital, as well as overall cost increases on the manufacturing side.
I actually learned this lesson way back when Polaris launched because I remember I was on this site looking at 290X/390X deals at <£300 but I said "let's wait, it's gonna be a worth it" then the RX 480 drops and it's basically same performance and same price, just lower power draw. Ever since then it's been the same pattern, prices keep going up and price/performance stays near constant outside of the higher end. It was clear it was like that with CPUs back then, but I hadn't learned the lesson with GPUs, nonetheless it happened for them too.
Crypto will have its down period eventually, no doubt, but regardless Eth is going PoS within a year so that means no more mining for them, which in turn means mining ROI overall will plummet. What I'm saying though is that that's not necessarily a good thing because I think the floor has been permanently raised, so those hoping that once mining operations implode that means they'll get their £649 MSRP 3080... nope! Instead you'll have been waiting & will have to pay more anyway but now you can't even make that money back. Imo that's decidedly worse and makes waiting pointless.
Today buying and mining (when the PC's not in use) still makes more sense, in a few months then no, but then you'll only be left with two options (if you don't want to pay extra today): keep waiting for lower prices indefinitely or give up.
And don't think that indefinitely is so far fetched either, remember what I said about Polaris? Well since then, 2016, (and really earlier still given the sales on Hawaii) they kept re-releasing more or less the same performance at that price range (480->580->590->5500XT) and now the same's happening for 5600 XT and 5700 XT. Nvidia's no better either, you can see they can't even be bothered to release an x50 version anymore, and even the x60 they regret putting out because they gave it 12 GB and it's costing them too much so it's in reality selling for way more than intended, when they even make it available. Who's to say the trend will stop? There's much more room for increasing prices, or so the market's saying.
Ultimately what I'm trying to get across to people is, the market is what it is, so make the best of it. If people are just even a little bit clever about it then they can actually have a great time with it.
