Gadgetory

welcome back to our own box for part two of why building a gaming PC right now is a bad idea previously we tackled DDR for pricing but today we'll be checking out graphics cards it's fair to say at the start of 2018 has been a wild ride for the tech industry and not just for tech giants but also consumers just as we thought GPU pricing was finally starting to settle down a late 2017 it's gone completely berserk and is really worse than ever there are a few reasons for why this has happened and these reasons have all come together to create the perfect storm these issues include demand from cryptocurrency miners increased memory prices and an explosion in the demand of Chinese gamers wanting to win a chicken dinner you know survive a round of pub G the major attributing factor I'd say is the fact that cryptocurrency mining profitability is way up for example a theorem is skyrocketed since December jumping from around $450 us to almost $1000 by the end of the month right now or at least at the time of piecing this video together the value has just hit over $1200 that's almost a hundred and seventy percent increase in about a month and a half no wonder miners are snapping up every last GPU they can get their hands on a theorem is also just one example there are no doubt more up-and-coming crypto currencies exciting miners so while we expected cryptocurrency mining to start cooling off in 2018 so far the opposite has occurred as I said in the previous episode when we talked about ddr4 memory pricing which has been driven up due to a lack of supply during a time of high demand or price fixing well the same things really happening with gddr5 memory and the expected that this RAM shortage will increase the cost of gråvik's cards mid-range graphics cards are projected to cost anywhere from five to twenty dollars us more and this will no doubt impact higher-end graphics cards with even more gddr5 memory on board even more that by itself isn't really a significant factor but when you lump it in with all the other issues that does add up so the cost of producing a graphics card I'd say that five to twenty dollar estimate for the mid-range card assumes normal market conditions that figure could certainly be amplified with such an extreme demand that we're seeing right now call us from miners and gamers I suppose many gamers seem to be pointing the finger and NVIDIA claiming price gouging or some other underhanded tactics I don't believe this was true though as was the case for much of last year this also impacts pricing if AMD graphics cards it just so happens that right now there is a slightly higher demand for NVIDIA GPUs in fact a possible explanation for this could be the Chinese market wanting to play pub gee I've recently spent quite a lot of time benchmarking both CPUs and GPUs and the massively popular player on owns battlegrounds over a dozen CPUs were tested and many dozen GPUs and what I found was the game pretty much hates AMD Hardware unfortunately because the game is built on the Unreal Engine 4 which was designed in collaboration with Nvidia at a time when Intel CPUs ruled it's none too kind to AMD GPUs or CPUs this is a real problem for AMD as the battle royal title is one of the most popular games on the planet right now and even while looking to play pub G will likely buy an NVIDIA GPU as they offer superior performance thanks to their influence when developing the game engine China has gone nuts over pub G and as a result the majority of Steam users now appear to be Chinese or at least used the most commonly spoken language in the world Chinese readers account for 64 percent of steam hardware survey respondents compared to just eight point six percent which was seen in 2016 of those Chinese gamers it's estimated that almost eighty percent of them own player and owns battlegrounds and have spent a considerable amount of time playing it this then helps to explain why the GeForce GTX 1060 series has shot up to number one position for the most widely used graphics card on the steam hardware survey almost 15 percent of all gamers using steam now Rock gtx 1060 the gtx 750ti came in second the gtx 960 and third and the 1052 I missed out on a podium spot by a few percent shockingly the top 13 GPUs are all Nvidia based and they make up for a whopping 71% of the steam user base so as I said earlier this looks to have created the perfect storm smashing GPU pricing and availability the situation game is a face with is pretty horrific right now there's really no other way to put it in fact pricing is just part of the problem and while a very big problem just getting your hands on a graphics card right now at any price can be a real challenge here's a breakdown of the current pricing as well as a look at prices back in November and April of 2017 now please note these are average asking prices not the absolute best or worst prices you've got to find online but rather what we deemed to be the typical asking price at the time based on data from various online retailers in the u.s. it's pretty clear that things have gotten well out of hand here availability and pricing of amy's radeon RX vega line that's been sketchy since release really in august of last year and and although things did settle down briefly in november prices of since shot up and it's really next to impossible even find one in stock meanwhile the rx 500 series is also mostly unavailable you can find some at various retailers but again prices have just skyrocketed the rx 580 for example isn't far off costing three times the MSRP that's insane meanwhile the rx 570 is over three times more expensive than the MSRP though we are only seeing a slight increase for the less desirable rx 560 it's the same situation with the Green Team don't expect to get a GeForce graphics card for anywhere near a reasonable price right now the GTX 1066 gigabyte which should sell for 250 dollars is going for over five hundred dollars and the 1070 is just as bad this is the worst GPU pricing situation I can ever recall saying surely prices can't stay this inflated for too long can they on that note I honestly don't know when graphics card pricing will return to normal levels or even start heading down towards the MSRP s memory pricing will remain an issue throughout 2018 so you can expect to pay some kind of premium this year for your graphics card the demand from Chinese gamers should start to cool off soon and that just leaves us with the gamers best friend the cryptocurrency miner I'd expect that mining will continue to see hot runs throughout 2018 so that will likely make buying a new graphics card a bit tricky on a final note I often read comments from gamers who are angry with either AMD or Nvidia blaming them for creating the shortages in order to price gouge and go on a claim they could simply increase production and offset the rise in demand sadly though that really isn't the situation at all neither AMD nor Nvidia owned the semiconductor manufacturing fabrication plants that produce their GPUs for that they primarily outsource to see SMC otherwise known as Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturing company more recently AMD does now use Global Foundries but the point is neither own these plants when supply runs short like what we're currently seeing due to our high demand there really isn't much that can be done in the short term to solve this if the plants are running at or near 100% capacity you can't just magically increase capacity further at least not without a massive investment and I mean massive even if you make that investment it's really years before I'll even be realised fabs require many expensive devices function and take years to build estimates put the cost at building a new fab at well over 1 billion dollars u.s. values as high as 3 to 4 billion aren't uncommon in fact tsmc invested 9.3 billion in its fab 15 300-millimeter wafer manufacturing facility in taiwan TSMC has also estimated that future fabs might cost in the vicinity of 20 billion dollars so it's not feasible or even remotely realistic to invest that kind of money to try and address what's likely a limited time only increase in demand at least in the grand scheme of things this means as was the situation when investigating the high ddr4 prices things won't really improve till demand drops off and when that's gonna happen for GP users i suppose anyone's guess really it's not clear like I said there's many factors at play here but right now it really does mean that building a new gaming PC is going to be significantly more costly than it oughta be so much so that we would recommend you hold off if possible so you'd have a disappointing way to end this video but that's the situation we're faced with unfortunately so let me know what you guys think about all this in the comment section below as always I read all your comments and love to hear your thoughts anyway that's going to do it for this one part 3 of this series will be coming very soon and until then take it easy I'm your host Steve I'll catch you again soon