Why GPU prices are NOT likely to drop significantly EVER!

[Harold lloyd]

I couldn't care less how expensive the enthusiast/insane/rich cards get. As long as the cards for ordinary/sensible people come back down.

I want to see good 1080p cards for £170 again.
Good 1440p cards for £250.

Maybe another 18 month wait.

Not likely to ever happen, the lower 1080p and 1440p cards still use a fair amount of raw materials at todays prices.
After 18 months we'll still be inside this commodities shortage upcycle, there are 7.9 Billion people out there remember.

 

[Harold lloyd]

4070 I recon will be £500 at most

We're dealing with a raw material/cheap oil/commodity shortage here, more like £800+ for a AIB 4070

You really didn't put much effort into this did you? The cheapest in stock 6900XT is £1199.99 at the suppliers I am watching. OCUK recently wiped 16% off the price of one model overnight - see the post here https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/posts/35106038, referring to historical prices for that model.

Yes but what's your average for 6900xt across the board, should be about £1500 or so same as mine.

 

[Harold lloyd]

I am not talking about AIB. I am talking MSRP. I am talking about FE. I don’t pay more than FE prices.

Competition matters at the end of the day. My guess in dollars is $499-$549 for it.

Yes that price range could be about right for a 4070 FE.
Wanted a FE card myself but no chance really here in the UK, still happy with my Gigabyte 6700XT. Good luck with getting a 4070 FE when they launch.

 

[Harold lloyd]

No, what you said was:



The lowest price that I found, currently, for a 6900XT is around £1200 - 20% lower than your lowest price.

I also drew your attention to a model that was reportedly £2100 6 months ago, £1800 last week and is £1500 now. I would posit that that counts as a "significant" drop. Countering your premise that they won't drop significantly "EVER!".

Yes you're right that drop from £2100 to £1500 is significant but looks to be price fixing!

Yup I posted the lowest prices on my update but the thread is not about lowest prices of every GPU.

To be clear to everyone what this thread is about when I first started it about 3 months ago :-

It means the AVERAGE GPU price of all the AIB 3090 cards or 6900xt cards etc using price data from many/most
retailers on the internet, AND this average price must hold for a month or two at least to be significant.

Example: AVERAGE GPU price of all the AIB 3090 brand cards should drop to about £1700 to be significant.

Example: AVERAGE GPU price of all the AIB 6900XT brand cards should drop to about £1000 to be significant.

None of this has happened since I started this thread almost 3 months ago. Lets see the prices a month or so on.

 

[Harold lloyd]

As far as I understand it, there are no shortages of oil or 'cheap oil'.

Where are you reading this?

Well one glance at the WTI oil chart will show you what's going on. (set WTI to Monthly not daily bars)

https://www.dailyfx.com/crude-oil

From 1980 (and earlier) the oil price was about $25 or less then around year 2000 it started moving up (cheap middle east oil shortage).
Also the industry had to make up the shortage with shale/Venezuela extra heavy crude/Canada oil sands which were known about for decades but weren't touched with
a barge pole due to high extraction cost.

So the oil price HAD to rise so the price of just about everything rises!
You need plenty of cheap oil to mine metals out of the ground, transport, food production, plastics, the carpets, curtains, the clothes on your back and GPUs and Oats too!
The Saudis have said that the Ghawar largest oil field in the world is producing much less.

 

[Harold lloyd]

Exactly. China crypto miners are or were the biggest buyers of GPU`s. If this all plays out like it should maybe just maybe normal pricing before year end.

I doubt the GPU prices would drop much even if all the crypto miners suddenly vanished from the face of the earth.

 

[Harold lloyd]

Agree, this seems to be a massive issue really. I wanted to ship a fairly cheap component that's normally inexpensive from China (electronics part) but the shipping is high and the timeframe is laughable.

UK could also do with sorting out this energy price hike, cant be having this problem in this day and age when renewables have been about for decades as has nuclear and we seem to have fallen down the leader board in Europe regarding most industries!

You've got to pay the piper at some point and so has the UK.
The world has been on oil for over 5 decades, Renewables and nuclear require fossil fuel energy for their production and maintenance they are just a joke in bad science fiction taste!
You really think we'll have Nuke power stations all over the place in the UK or solar panels/wind generators or mass numbers of electric cars?
Just one cup of crude oil contains a huge amount of energy + provides plastics and useful chemicals, do the math renewables and nuclear are just a science fiction fantasy!

 

[Harold lloyd]

It will be next year when ethereum goes POS that we will see some major reductions unless we have a huge crypto price crash before then.

While Gpus continue to be a means of generating money then people will continue to pay top dollar to get them.

If crypto crashes big or the craze starts disappearing we'll see how it affects GPU prices, but I still believe not much impact, seems to be more a global energy crisis=commodity shortage.

 

[Harold lloyd]

Dont really get your point @Harold lloyd . You can be as captain obvious as you like but if you don't make an effort, nothing will get done or change!

People probably thought the smoking ban would never take off and we depended on them tobacco firms and taxes! Doing the math is simple, you cant use fossil fuels forever and you certainly don't want to be bent over the barrel (pun intended) too long.

I'll put it simply, you need a huge energy yield to keep the global economy running, cheap oil provides this, you won't get this from renewables.
Nuclear has this huge yield even more than oil but its not really possible to set up so many Nuke reactors or in a short time +the waste problems.
Bottom line the world moved from coal to oil because we were Forced to to keep the economy running, but once the cheap oil is gone there is nothing else!
With no cheap energy source the global economy will implode with shortages/inflation/production declines and at some point when the big markets break
a mad max type world will appear outside.

check out Gail Tvberg's pages
I don't agree on everything she says but she's grounded in common sense and science.

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2021/08/...-level-of-conflict-reflect-an-energy-problem/

 

[Harold lloyd]

Without derailing the thread too much, I think it's inevitable that most nations will fail to meet their climate targets. It's simply too little too late. The investment for Nuclear and renewables should have happened a decade sooner. Even if we now fully cut emissions by 50% and our reliance on fossil fuels by 2030, we are still very much on course for hugely damaging climate effects. I think we will eventually cut emissions but over a longer period, and what we will be mostly dealing with is technologies to modify the climate and mitigate the damaging effects on farming for example and marine life, this might be by using aerosols in the atmosphere to deflect sunlight to cool areas of the Earth down. But what would be better is if we had some decent volcanic activity (not near any populated areas) that could create a natural aerosol for the Earth by chucking out some sulfur - which was believed to have been the case in 1275 when there was a Little Ice Age.

Which is pretty much what I said until King Harold decided to debunk it or dismiss it as folly..

You have private companies now making rockets that land themselves, take people into space and can dig huge tunnels linking cities.

The technology is there for the taking. A far cry from stating "just a science fiction fantasy"

I'll say this though.
If Nuclear/renewables are able to power the global economy and the world switches to them from crude oil I will eat my hat and make a public apology statement on this forum for
wasting everyone's time writing nonsense.

NOT going to happen 100%!

 

[Harold lloyd]

The oil price rose so the more expensive extraction methods became economically viable. Industry didn't have to do it, somebody just realised they could make money from it.

You have heard of OPEC haven't you? Venezula are members, so they might have helped pursuade the others that the price needed to be higher if they didn't have any other viable oil fields; I suppose (hey I said I was badly informed). But the risk for them in doing so is that non-members like Canada and, say, the US can also take advantage of less viable fields too and mess with their carefully laid quotas.

But Saudi Arabia is also a member of OPEC so will be sticking with the quotas.

Plus apparently the current price of oil is within OPEC's target range. So that's all right then.

That's the point they don't want to raise the price of oil too much or less sales as most of the worlds population is poor working class people. Same with GPUs, with lower GPU prices you get tons of sales.
The marketing people at the oil companies saw that decades ago and didn't raise the price as they knew it wouldn't sell in mass numbers, the British too tried to up the price of coal it ended badly with coal
production peaking in 1913, the worlds coal markets would have none of it and so the age of coal came to an end and we were forced to go to oil deposits. You can't just jack up prices on a huge global market
but the British had no choice at that time.

Venezuela's oil production/economy is falling apart, they need something like $75 per barrel to balance their books, the Saudis need much less per barrel, shale and Canada oil sands need similar high prices
to keep production growth BUT we haven't had these prices in over 5 years now.
I'm not making a call on the oil market or the end of the oil age but it sure looks suspicious like when coal production peaked and they were unable to push up the world coal price.

 

[Harold lloyd]

We are not running out of oil anytime soon which will give us time to make the switch to other types of fuel and energy.

Nuclear fission and fusion is definitely the way forward, but so is hydrogen power (not fuelled vehicles). In fact, there has already been talks for using decommissioned nuclear power plants for hydrogen power. There has also been breakthroughs in fusion reactor technology for power (which removes the waste problem), and the UK is one of the leading nations in this, but this won't be ready by the 2030s at the earliest.

Sure we're not running out of oil there's still plenty of it same as coal deposits, BUT once the cheap oil is extracted the rest will stay put and NOT be extracted as you need so much energy cost to extract the
rest. The world oil market won't take kindly to jacking up the price, just about everything depends on it, its not like other markets its VERY price sensitive=volatile.

What state will the UK and global economy be in by 2030? and you're going to need an awful lot of nuclear plants.

 

[Harold lloyd]

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[Harold lloyd]

Odd that farmers are currently being paid subsidies to keep land as grass and not grow crops. Grass is only used for cattle feed. Meat production one of biggest methane emissions which is 20 x more harmful than Co2. All whilst hosting CoP26 this year!

We'll farmers are not growing enough, wheat prices are sky high, oats and cooking oil (canola) are making new world record prices etc!

 

[Harold lloyd]

Why are you scaremongering? Our currency has always shown these signs, nothing new.

Not scaremongering just giving a early forecast.

We were told by the media, policy makers, central bank heads etc that the supply chain disruptions were the cause of unusually high inflation but now many
months have passed and supply chains and inventory's have not improved and it just looks like a convenient pack of lies! I see nothing temporary about the inflation?

I'm talking about a major currency devaluation which has been 50 years in the making. You're already seeing some of this take effect with high GPU and other item prices.
If there is no full blown currency collapse (pray) I expect at the least we'll see a MAJOR currency devaluation for the pound/dollar/euro etc through the next few years.
This means we'll be paying about 1k for a decent high end GPU and about 2k for top end from now on.

 

[Harold lloyd]

7. I am not buying any of that stuff as my 3600 build (2019) with 3090FE is plenty for a long while. I hope people are not maxing out their credit at this moment in time and bracing themselves for 2022 to be honest @Harold lloyd !

Yep sticking with my 3700x, maybe upgrade my 6700xt in a few years, got 64GB so plenty of ram until say 2030, Lol.

 

[Harold lloyd]

The government had made everything function on credit. So why are you scaremongering?

It's all credit even cash, its not real gold and silver coins!
Like in Lebanon now even if you have the cash or credit ready you can't get to buy products if there's zero inventory (eg GPUs)!

 

[Harold lloyd]

And why are you posting here the FT forums would love you if you posted this info there,

You're right I should post there but since I've been programming PC's for decades including todays modern GPUs I thought I would post post here as GPU shortages are
one of the first things that showed up on the radar.

In the early days there was no GPUs or directx, we did 3D polygons on the 386/486 cpu using assembler (machine code) like Nascar racing etc.
A rare mix of market trader and PC programmer!

It's funny you should mention precious metals, see my post below.

 

[Harold lloyd]

The 3700x is still a magnificent chip, I'm wanting a 5000 series but it's really difficult to justify replacing this little beast of a CPU.

Stay with your current cpu until you actually need more cpu power for something important.

 

[Harold lloyd]

*** IMPORTANT*** *** IMPORTANT*** *** IMPORTANT*** *** IMPORTANT***


1. The time you need to panic is when the US loses control of their key interest rates and it goes up to 5% or higher.
We are not there yet so no need to panic or expect mad max going on outside.

2. I've been watching the gold market for over 15 months now and its held steady with an average of $1700/oz or better
during that time so this is telling me that the first level of inflation/currency devaluation is very likely cemented now.
So no going back to low prices of the last 3 years or so across the board for products.

But something exiting seems to be happening just this week from Monday yesterday.
Gold is starting to break out in many major currencies, unless this is a false break then we may be moving into
the SECOND level of inflation/currency devaluation and also in the last few weeks crude oil has broken out after
7 years!
I don't really use TA but it can give important clues but either way I think the first inflation level is cemented in history now for the major currencies.

Gold can act as an accurate pricing measure against commodities/currencies over centuries and longer timespans.
This is about as exiting as it gets, lets see what happens from here on.

Regards, Harold