Indeed, where are they? It seems almost impossible to find any Pascal (Nvidia) or Vega (AMD) based GPUs. And if you do, it will be on Amazon or E-bay to exorbitant prices (some Vega 64 are being traded at 2,000.00 USD, far from its 599,00 release and advertised price).
Why? You know the answer. Crypto-mining.
Even though Bitcoin has long left the GPU mining scene, in the past 2 to 3 years, other alt-coins such has Ethereum, Monero or Zcash, have been entering it. And with a bank.
Ethereum is being traded at about 1,000.00 USD and Ether making it wildly profitable to mine with a recent GPU. A single Geforce GTX 1070Ti can turn in a 100 USD net benefit after paying its electrical consumption.
And of course, this started a gold-rush from legions of amateur and semi-amateurs crypto miners on to this lucrative hobby.
Video card suppliers are of course delighted to keep the market begging and their product scarce. And this, as their factories are in full production mode.
The only real loser, as usual, is the mainstream consumer. The teenage kid who just wants to play the latest GTA, COD and other equally cryptic abbreviative games, in 4k. How dare they!
The only hope they can entertain is to acquire a holder or much slower video card with less than 2 GB of onboard memory. And that’s simply because crypto-mining usually requires more than 2GB of memory for mining to take place at all.
How about the future…? Suffice to say that Nvidia has just released its latest Titan V video cards, based on its latest and long anticipated Volta architecture, for nothing less than 3,000 bucks!
