Graphics card availability predictions.

[Spiritwolf]

Since the availability of graphics card is such a joke right now, might as well make a game out of it.

Lets see your best guess on when different graphics card will become widely available (when there are stock readily available to purchase), feel free to attach the reason for your guess, and see who is right at by the end of the year.

Lets keep it light hearted

Nvidia
3060Ti - Until Crypto Collapse (EoY?)
3070 - Mid April
3080 - Until Crypto Collapse (EoY?)
3090 - Mid March

AMD
6800 - April
6800XT - May
6900XT - April

Reasons:
3060Ti and 3080 are by far the best mining graphics card right now, demand is going to be unlimited until mining is no longer profitable.

3070 - Decent card for gaming and all rounder, seems to have a good production rate and profit margins for manufacturers, once lock down ends and everyone starts spending money outside supply should have caught up.

3090 - Pretty niche card imo, people seem to be only buying it because other cards are not available, as soon as other cards become more readily available demand should fall sharply.

AMD cards.
AMD cards suck for mining, which is a good thing, and also a lot of people still have not warmed up to their graphics card yet, so demand shouldn't be where they are at the moment, the main issue is AMD pretty much just making consoles at the moment.
Once they really start ramping up graphics card production their cards should becoming more readily available, it is a shame they are not using this opportunity to steal gaming market share from nvidia but instead focus on consoles. Once people start going out console demand will ease and that should fix itself.

Once mining collapses I predict there will a huge flood of cheap graphics cards selling at half to 1/3 price of their MSRPs due to miners bailing out. (Remember back in 2019 where you could find a x570 for £60 on EB?) Similar situation should play out.

 

[Spiritwolf]

Hopefully Intel will surprise us all with their first “Gaming” focused GPU shortly.

Knowing our luck it will probably on be so so for gaming and yet great for mining...

Didn't they already release that (intel Xe) DG1? it was supposed to be pretty terrible.

 

[Spiritwolf]

The Chinese shipping container problem will be sorted by mid-March. I think one of the problems is not the miners but the reluctance to take a margin hit on shipping the goods too far from China and Taiwan.

Door to door it’s about 50 days so if you start at mid March you end up at the 2nd week in May before the shipping situation returns to normal.

Right now all the cards are sold out in China also, there were stock around Jan, but now it is clean shelf since bitcoin blew up, miners bought everything they can get their hands on, assuming they can make the money back within 3 months. I doubt with shipping improvements you will get any more stock.

 

[Spiritwolf]

I've been lurking some of the miner reddit, apparently you can get pallets of the stuff if you are willing to pay a tiny bit above MSRP.

There are guides on how people can order 32x 3080 directly from the distributors within 2 weeks, they are effectively competing with the stores like OCUK, only they do not have to worry about profit margins with the current levels of insane ROI.

 

[Spiritwolf]

I take your point but that's not how global allocations for go-to market strategies work, its the beer factory demand problem set in 2021.

Nvidia, AMD, Microsoft are U.S companies and because of that fact, they will make sure China gets a share but it will be in the context of a global allocation.

I would say not to see China as a big vortex sucking in everything around it, regardless of the hyperbole on sites like Videocardz.

Of course there are global allocations, however there are miners everywhere too. I know someone who is running a 6 x 3060Ti right now, and is looking to setup another 6 if he gets the chance. (And yes he bought them from scalpers)

 

[Spiritwolf]

There's a couple of issues with this line of thinking.

Firstly the 3090 makes 1.5x the money the 3080 does and while it costs twice as much most miners are in it for the long haul which means that making 1.5x the crypto every month until the end of time is far more appealing than a relatively minor saving in initial outlay (plus it's easier to find which is a bonus).

As for AMD cards sucking at mining, this is quite comical to hear as for the vast majority of time mining has been the domain of AMD, hell there was a time when an Nvidia flagship could barely keep up with an AMD midrange card at mining but new algorithms/coins came out that specifically targeted Nvidia hardware and you can bet if the pendulum does ever swing too far in Nvidia's favour the same will happen again for AMD architecture.

Don't forget that at launch many considered the Vega cards to be bad for mining, however refinements in mining tools and fine tuning resulted in them being so prolific for mining that more Vega cards ended up in mining farms than in gaming PCs.

At the end of the day the 6900xt, 6800xt, 6800 and RTX3070 all perform around the same but with varying costs, however as mentioned above initial cost isn't a real concern for most miners. Most will simply pick up whatever they can find and eat the cost difference.

Not just that, I've tried all different cards for mining here are the hash rates and rough power consumptions

3060Ti 60MH/s 110W ~£450
3070 60MH/s 130W ~£550
3080 (never got my hands on it but heard around 95MH/s at 200W ~£800
3090 120MH/s at 270W ~£1500

3060Ti is by far the best for mining if you can get a hold of lots of them both power and ROI costs.

3090 is by far the worst, I can get 3 3060Ti with the price and out perform it by 50%