About a year ago everything was fine and dandy. If you wanted to build yourself a nice and powerful computer you could with ease. I am referring to the cost of parts. Prices do fluctuate from time to time but for the most part you know what to expect. A year ago a processor, a motherboard, and a graphics card were at what we would refer to as having a "normal price". The one component which has started to climb in price was the SSD hard drive. An increase in price started sometime last year. These types of drives have been on a roller coaster ride for the past few years where the price goes up and down. They've been up ever since last year. Nowadays many of us accept this price as being the "norm".
About a month ago or so a new mining craze has swept the globe. It's called Ethereum. A similar mining craze happened a few years ago when Bitcoin exploded. This caused the prices of AMD graphics cards to skyrocket. Fortunately I was able to get my R9 270 just as its price was climbing by paying about $30 over its retail price. Then the crash came. People were offloading their cards on sites like eBay for cheap. This was fantastic for those who wanted to upgrade from their older card. I even got another R9 270 to CrossFire it with my first card to improve my performance in some games.
Jumping back to the present we now have Ethereum. It started with the AMD RX series graphics cards. Last year I got an RX 480 8GB graphics card at the time of launch for the retail price of $239.99. Now these cards sell out as soon as retailers stock them. On eBay these cards are fetching over $100 of their retail price and these are not new cards these are for used cards. The RX 500 series are also included in this price hike. With this mining craze it did start with the AMD cards but slowly it began to spread towards the NVIDIA cards. The mid-range GTX 1000 series cards began to sell out and their prices have also jumped.
If someone is building themselves a new computer or are wanting to upgrade their old GPU their only option is for either a low tier card or a high tier card from NVIDIA. I don't mention AMD since they currently do not have anything to compete with the GTX 1080 or 1080 Ti and AMD's low tier cards do not perform as well as NVIDIA's low tier cards. That's just the plain and honest truth. We're waiting to see what RX Vega can do in terms of performance when it launches.
Why am I writing this? Well it is because I enjoy pricing budget gaming systems. It's one of the things I do for my YouTube channel. There are times when I'll consider using a pre-built computer from a generation or two ago like a Dell or HP computer. All it needs is just a budget friendly graphics card. The gaming rig would perform well at 1080p resolution with decent graphical settings for most games. It would be a system which could outperform a gaming console. About a year ago a system like this would go for about $300 - $400. Now it would cost about $100 - $200 more. This is not fair for those on a tight budget. Well, life isn't fair. What can we do? At this point all we can do is wait for the craze to die down. At least some manufacturers are helping to alleviate the scarcity. They are releasing graphics cards directed at miners. These cards lack most output ports.
There may not be a point to my story and there may not be a conclusion. I just felt I wanted to write something that's been on my mind recently. It is like having an itch that I have been wanting to scratch for a while. Writing about it helps take care of that itch. In the meantime thank you for reading. Take care and have a great day!
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