Monday, July 10th 2017
No End to GPU Supply Woes: Germany Supplier Hit by Shortage, Pulls Cards
There seems to be no end in sight for current high-performance, discrete graphics cards' supply constraints. If you've been looking for a specialized graphics processing unit to push eye-candy on your favored 3D experiences to the max, you've probably been having trouble for a while now. It all stems from a crazy, dizzying wave of cryptocurrency mining. And the fact that this mining spree has already taken global mining power consumption to levels close to a 17 million population country, as one of our editors puts it, kind of has a human problem. And it would seem that not even NVIDIA and AMD's partners' attempts to sate current miners' appetite for profit-generating graphics cards has put a dent on demand.
Now, one of Germany's most relevant retailers, MindFactory, has sent out an email to Tom's Hardware responding to inquiries relating to an apparent lack of stock on high-performance GPUs. And get this: they're expecting new stock in "at least three months". That's how long the retailer is estimating meaningful supply might be available again: in three month's time. Specifically, MindFactory said that "In fact we ordered the GPU's but because of the high demand on the RX and GTX graphic cards which is related to BitCoin farming the manufacturer can not give us a delivery date. We expect a delivery time of at least 3 months. This shortage affects the whole of Germany, maybe even whole Europe. "
Well, this editor can attest that yes, Europe is definitely being affected. Even in my own country, tiny Portugal, westernmost country of the European Continent, there have been shortages on RX 570 and 580 graphics cards on some of the most renowned digital stores. This phenomenon has come to stay, folks. Just hold on to your horses, and do your best to endure it.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
42 Comments on No End to GPU Supply Woes: Germany Supplier Hit by Shortage, Pulls Cards
to make a picture of HOW bad it is look at this price-comparison-site
geizhals.eu/?cat=gra16_512&v=k&hloc=at&hloc=de&hloc=pl&hloc=uk&hloc=eu&fcols=9808&fcols=132&sort=p&xf=132_6144#productlist
I was looking at RX560 4GB like 3 weeks ago. 125€ Today? Exactly the same one 154€. F**k off. I ended up paying a bit more and grabbing cheapest GTX 1050Ti for the time being at 168€ because I opted for dual fan one with heatpipe cooler instead of singe fan one with block of aluminium as heatsink, until RX Vega gets released. I hear Vega is terrible at mining which is already great news.
@dumbo
He's not tired of reading about crypto miners, he's pissed off because they totally f**ked up the graphics cards market. And so am I.
/edit: ^heh, too slow :)
It's particularly bad for AMD. They desperately need market share and with mass sales of mining cards, they aren't gaining any and with no availability of their cards, it means most people will defect to NVIDIA. Guess what they'll continue buying in the future. It'll probably be NVIDIA by default after that. It's a short term financial injection for AMD which will hurt them a lot long term...
And there's no point in denying you were at least a little offended. If you took objection at ignorance in general on the internet you'd basically have to spend 100% of your time "flagging" it to the ignorant party :).
I love how people are mad on the internet.
One thing I'd like to add though: I am sick to death of people saying 'oh just sign up for notifications'. As if email speed is 100% reliable and the miners don't already have notifications set for everything.
I was genuinely in need for a good 580-like GPU and had to wait for 2.5 months for it. At least I got it for 300 EUR back then. Now you can't even find one. Lol!
Imagine when this is all over! Tons of 580s, dime a dozen! I bet you'll wish you bought these multi-PCIe mobos!
They hate the fact that gamers can't get cards but with miners buying them all up, the GPU market has become as volatile as cryptocurrency has. Minimal inventory is safer for them.
There's a big push to get mining cards out to the market. I think the main purpose for this is because then they have more control over RMAs (when it crashes, they can say "LOL, NOPE").The inflated prices aren't MSRP. They're other people/businesses/retailers in the market selling cards at non-MSRP capitalizing on the limited supply.This is about the only situation I would even consider an NVIDIA card because price/performance, GTX 1050 Ti is really the only option. That said, my loyalties aren't changing. I still firmly believe NVIDIA is a terrible company. :p
I wouldn't say NVIDIA is a terrible company. Their practices are shit and they've had the upper hand for too long which makes them bad. But you can't deny their technological superiority at the moment. The gap started with Maxwell 2 and was just reinforced with Pascal.
I was thinking about grabbing RX560 4GB, but then decided for GTX 1050Ti. At least it was obtainable in 1 day (others were for 15 days!) and for extra 10€ it has dual fan proper cooler with heatpipe instead of just a large chunk of aluminium heatsink. RX570 and RX580 were totally out of the question even though I'd prefer that. RX580's sell for even up to 450€. That's just crazy.
Thanks to mining, we are stuck in months of worst time to buy a graphic card because of heavily inflated prices and no availability. Just in time when I decide to buy one as replacement... Just pissed 30€ because I haven't grabbed one just few weeks ago.
Sorry if someone is willing to pay a premium price, RTG should be able to get back there engineering investment.
AMD especially needs gamers to buy their products for long term health. Miners bought up tons of 7000/200 series cards for mining, remember? Remember what happened net? AMD hitting 17% shipping marketshare and loosing huge chunks of the market to nvidia's cards, even when the AMD parts were considered better. This kind of craze does long term damage to AMD.
What AMD needs to do is create a mining only card, which they are already doing, and perhaps make a card that, either through hardware or drivers, sucks at mining to dissuade miners from buying them. VEGA supposedly is like this, very poor at mining and expensive to boot. Or perhaps develop the ASIC that would be used for mining, thus preventing the scalping of their GPUs.
Watching the miners rant, even if only for a day, because of driver crippling would bring a grin to my face though.
These new sellers with weirdly spelled names are scammers - These guys will take a broken card and try to sell it as a working unit, using the fleabay/PayPal system to get away with it too because the info as to where they are and where it's coming from as examples are faked.
Know a guy personally that had an RX460 for sale and had a ton of "Buyers" make bids and offers on his card BUT all of these buyers were as described above so he pulled the listing to keep from getting ripped off.
You can use/manipulate the system fleabay uses to rip sellers off with no recourse to the seller if you know how..... And even as a buyer you can be ripped too, have a nephew this happened to not long ago.
There is $$ in the mining of AND selling of the equip to do it with since the cards are certainly meant for more than just mining or there woudn't be supply issues for guys that are gamers for example. In fact I highly suspect there is a certain "Enterprise" behind much of this of a criminal nature. It's already been proven criminal organizations use crypo currency because there is no easy way to track where the money goes or what it's used for.
This for example can make money laundering EZPZ to do if they wanted to - And BTW they already have before.
With the recent ransomware attacks, the supply of certain GPU's drying up, what I've noted about fleabay in general with these GPUs just adds up to all this in my mind and it's all too coincidental to be much anything else.
OK - I'm done now guys.... :fear:
There are ways to get a hold of certion cards at a small profit mark-up, buy the cards, and then resell them for profit for use them what ever way you want. I'm not complaining, I got my 100+ gpus before the the shortage happened and now will unload most of it for a nice profit.
Demand has overrun supply, it happens. Prices go up until things balance out. GPU makers are happy, they're selling faster than they can make them.