Graphics cards are hard to come by these days, and pretty much impossible to get at a reasonable price. Last Friday, NVIDIA dropped a bunch of Founders Edition (why is there no apostrophe in that, anyway?) cards on their website which sold out in about two minutes. I was shooting for a GTX 1070ti, which at $450 was a really good price point for the card. However, I wasn’t able to get one in spite of being there when they went live.
There is currently a GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1080 GV-N1080IX going for $610, which is $60 above what a 1080 Founders Edition would go for. Considering this is the same price that the least expensive 1070 ti’s are going for right now (and 1070 ti’s FE cards retail for $450), this seems about as small of a markup over MSRP as I’m likely to find on a graphics card these days.
So the question is do you think it’s worth it? I know NVIDIA is supposedly releasing the next generation in the near future, so maybe I should hold off until then, but I’ve also heard rumors that the next gen isn’t really going to be changing the price paradigm right now. And sure, the cryptocurrency boom might crash at some indefinite point in the future, but no one really knows when that’s going to be, and even should the crash occur, who knows how long it’ll take for the prices to come down to reasonable points again (and that doesn’t even take into consideration that some claim the paradigm has shifted and we might not see GPU prices return to where they were at 2 years ago for a while.)
I think I’d get it - even if the next generation is markedly different, a top of the line card now will be good enough for some years to come. Hell, my 8800GT soldiered on until last year in various roles.
Also, I’d guess the crypto miners will still be grabbing cards as fast as they can. I hope the crypto bubble bursts before my 1070 becomes obsolete.
They are at prices close to MSRP though that might be getting better since crypto took a hit since December. But, for a while there, the card Hoopy Frood is describing was going for $1,000 easy. Right now the “cheaper” Founders Edition $945 and sold out on Newegg.
If I were Hoopy Frood and in the market for a card and could afford it, I’d jump on it. Maybe the GPU market will come down but I don’t think it’s going to get as cheap as it was in, say, 2016 or early 2017. I think that a price close to MSRP is about as good as it gets right now. And the 1080 is a big enough boost over the 1070s that I’d feel comfortable paying the price.
So crypto currency miners were driving up the prices because they were buying them up? Hmm…if so, I never knew that. I knew they needed a huge swath of powerful computers, but what do they need an advanced GPU for? Wouldn’t a hot processor and tons of RAM do the trick?
It won’t, for the same reason a gaming PC can’t get by with a hot CPU and tons of RAM but no GPU. GPUs are optimized for performing the types of calculations required for 3D graphics, and they blow a CPU out of the water performance-wise in that role. It turns out that the computations used for cryptocurrencies also lend themselves quite well to running on a GPU.
GPU architecture makes it exceptionally powerful for the sort of computing required for crypto mining. The CPU actually matters very little. From the Bitcoin Wiki:
Plus you can have one desktop computer running two cards or one of the specialty mining rigs running 8-10 cards off a single CPU.
Sorry to the OP for the hijacking, but…are there really that many crypto miners in the US as compared to abroad? If not, are the overseas miners paying more of a premium for them than normal? Just trying to figure out the shortage here in the US. Of course, I don’t think the OP mentioned living here, so maybe there’s a tighter supply elsewhere. There’s plenty of big box computer stores across the country that sell nothing but computer stuff, like this place Microcenter here in Cincinnati.
I don’t know which of these 1080 cards the OP is pricing, but the two listed at the beginning of the list on the linked page are WAY more than $610.
They’re “way more than that” because Microcenter is jacking up the price due to demand. Before, MC was selling them for a little over suggested retail – I bought a 1080 for $629 in January – but you had to be there the morning they were delivered and the shelf would be cleaned out by noon. When I went on a random day, the GPU aisle looked like the bread aisle the day before a hurricane landing. Now MC decided they were just leaving money on the table and started raising the price well above MSRP since everyone else is doing it as well.
The original MSRP for the 1080 line was in the $600-$650 range depending on bells and whistles. MC is selling them now for around $800 and that’s down from their previous high. By the way, the $1000+ cards are 1080 Ti cards which are more powerful though also well inflated in prices.
Making the crypto miner issue worse is the fact that computer memory itself is a tight market these days. So many things from phones to tablets to game consoles to various forms of computers to appliances require memory and the manufacturers can’t keep up. So the GPU companies can’t just easily make twice as many GPUs because the memory isn’t there to make them affordably. And they’re also hesitant to ramp up production facilities because if mining crashes they’re stuck with all this extra capacity. So they’ve been largely content so far to make as many as they can as fast as they can with their current conditions, knowing that each one will sell almost immediately.
Newegg’s got the card he’s talking about for the price he quoted. IME, it’s got about the best prices for video cards, absent the odd deal at places like slickdeals, or if you can find a private seller on ebay or craigslist. Caveat emptor, duh.
610 looks a lot cheaper than I’ve been seeing 1080s go for, not that all 1080s are created equal. Annoying, as I was this close to upgrading from my 750ti at Black Friday, and said, “It’ll surely get cheaper after Xmas!” Sigh.
FWIW, my understanding is that: 1) various cryptocurrencies are starting to fall, whether through gov’t hostility, fraud worries, or overproduction and 2) chip sets are being created that are specifically optimized for producing crypto coins. If true, hopefully the domestic GPU market will fall a bit more. Absent a deal I can’t refuse, I’ll probably upgrade after the new generation comes out. Related to that, what do people like in a 4K monitor these days? I’m not a gamer that needs 1ms response time, and I’ll probably use it as a TV-substitute.
Jophiel, what I’ve seen at places like userbenchmark is that a 1070ti and 1080 are practically the same, games-wise. (Unless you’re playing PUBG or BF1) Is that so, or is a 1080 much easier to overclock?
I’ve never seen anything like this shortage before. I’m also looking for a new GPU since I got a 1440p monitor, and I can find some GTX 1080 base models for about €600, but only if I want it delivered in May sometime. I think I’ll just hold out for the next-gen cards, I figure they can’t be too much more expensive than what we’re seeing right now and apparently support for Ray-tracing is the hot new thing they’re pushing this year so I guess that might be good to have.
Traditionally you could save some money by building your own gaming rig, but this is no longer true: individual buyers have to pay a significant premium price for the GPU–while the computer manufacturers get them at their usual discount–since they have long term contracts.
Does this by chance have anything at all to do with rare earth metals, substances that US manufacturers are heavily reliant on imports for?
Yeah, but by then they’ll be obsolete!
True. I’ve looked at gaming rigs on Ebay and the builds for towers only with just an OS that are reasonably priced have woefully old and underpowered GPU’s, shitty processors and such. It doesn’t save you money if you immediately have to upgrade equipment.
Not sure if one overclocks better than the other but the general vibe I’ve gotten from 1070 Ti reviews was that it was maybe 90% of a 1080 but also at 90% of the cost so, if you could swing it, you were probably better off going the rest of the way and getting the 1080 for a nominal extra charge.
True. Someone I know recently bought a system with a 1080, i7-8700, 16 GB RAM plus the drives (boot SSD), etc for $1200 from Dell (there was an extra 17% off coupon as well). Considering that you’d possibly be paying around $800 for the GPU alone, there was no way to beat that price on a home built with the same specs. I played with PC Part Picker and couldn’t touch that final pricing.
I think fabs* are analogous to petrochemical refineries; The capital costs are in the billions of dollars and take a long time to build so an uptick in the price of what they produce seldom results in a new one being built. Instead, you get price swings. It goes the other way too; A few years ago, RAM was cheap.
That’s likely because the games in those benchmarks are being tested at 1080 resolution and some of those games are very undemanding to begin with. They’re grossly overpowered for that and may be bottlenecked at the CPU, hence the sometimes equal performance. If you benchmarked them at higher resolutions or with fancier effects, you’d start to see a real difference. Game performance (when not CPU-bottlenecked) is usually chiefly dependent on memory bandwidth and the 1080 has a definite advantage over the 1070ti there at 320 or 350 vs 256 GB/s.
PUBG is undemanding? News to me. Some of the others at that link seem like they are though.
The link I posted lists a few games with differences in frame rate. I think Jophiel answered my GPU question. Great price on the package.
1080 it is then. Or a 1080ti watercooled I’ve been drooling over. I’ll go be poor somewhere else…
Any advice as to a decent 4k monitor, in y’all’s experience? Response time not critical. EDIT: I mean the monitor’s response time. Well, really both; I’m not buying one today, but sometime in the near future.
Re: Undemanding: I was thinking of games like CS:GO or Overwatch. Even GTA V is half a decade old.
Note that PUBG is one of the games where you do see a 15% difference between the 1080 and 1070ti.
Watercooling may not be that much of an improvement, unless you want something really quiet. A good GPU shouldn’t run all that hot. It might be a better investment to go for one of the upmarket brands known for their quiet and overclockability like EVGA (which I wish I’d done instead of Zotac).
I don’t have advice for monitors other than to consider G-sync, 21:9 ratio or 10-bit monitors if you haven’t yet. Those may be better than 4k, especially since current-generation GPUs aren’t quite up to the challenge of delivering a solid 60fps at 4k for some games.
G-sync is the one that’s optimized for nvidia, right? What do 21:9 ratio and 10-bit get me?
Basically looking for something that can do double-duty as a TV and is somewhat future-proof for the next 5 years or so.
Agreed that none of them yet seem to be able to handle something like Witcher 3 cranked to the max with all the texture packs. Then again, I just got done with another Baldur’s Gate trilogy playthrough, so I’m not the most demanding of consumers…
G-sync: Yes. If you want upper tier GPU performance, you’re going with Nvidia or Nvidia, unfortunately. It’ll cost about 100-150$ on top but it seems worth it for a smooth experience. Otherwise, anytime you dip under 60fps even by 1fps, you drop all the way to 30fps.
10-bit: richer colors, more detail. I don’t know enough about it and the available content to say if it’s worth it right now. Worth researching or starting a thread so more knowledgeable people can give input.
