So I finally had a Saturday free a couple weeks back and decided it was time to replace the graphics card in my aging desktop. Nothing fancy, just wanted to get off my old GTX 960 and into something that could run recent stuff at more than 40fps. Went to Micro Center expecting to walk out with a GTX 1070 for something close to the $380 it was going for back in the spring.
Yeah, that's not how that went.
The shelf where the 1070s usually sit had exactly one box on it, a weird open-box unit with a torn sticker, priced at $549. The 1060s were gone entirely. AMD's RX 580, which launched at $229 back in April, had a little printed tag taped under the empty peg that just said "check with associate." I did. He shrugged in a way that told me he'd had this exact conversation probably fifteen times that day already.
I don't think this is news to anyone who's been near a PC hardware forum lately, but if you haven't, here's the short version: cryptocurrency mining has basically eaten the mid-range graphics card market. Ethereum mining runs great on consumer GPUs, unlike bitcoin mining which moved to dedicated ASIC hardware years ago, and with prices doing what they're doing right now (bitcoin's been bouncing around the $11-15k range depending on which hour of the day you check, and altcoins are dragging along with it) there's suddenly a very large incentive for people to buy six or eight midrange cards, rack them in a garage, and let them chew through hash calculations 24 hours a day.
Newegg had a 580 listed for $409. That's not a typo, that's just what it costs now, apparently. eBay is worse, obviously, because eBay is always worse. I saw a triple-fan 1070 going for $612 with 340 people watching it.
I get the economics of it, I really do. If a card pays for itself in mining rewards in ten or twelve weeks, of course people are going to buy every one they can find and prices are going to follow demand up. That's just how markets work and I'm not mad at any individual miner for doing math. What annoys me is the version of this story where a hobby I've had since I was fourteen, building and upgrading my own machine, has quietly become collateral damage in a financial story that has nothing to do with games or rendering or anything a GPU was originally built for. My 960 is fine, I guess. It's going to keep being fine for a while longer, whether I like it or not.
A few things that are worth doing if you're in the same boat:
- Check Micro Center's in-store stock before Newegg or Amazon; several people online have reported actual sane prices showing up in physical stores because miners tend to buy in bulk online, not walk into a strip mall.
- Older cards are getting weirdly reasonable by comparison. A used GTX 970 is still a fine 1080p card and nobody wants it for mining margins the way they want a 580.
- If you can wait, wait. Nvidia's got newer stuff rumored for next year and this kind of price spike historically cools off once difficulty catches up with demand or a coin correction happens. Might be a few months. Might be longer, I have no idea, I am not a fortune teller, I just wanted to play some games at a decent frame rate.
I ended up not buying anything. Walked out of Micro Center empty-handed for the first time in years, which felt bizarre. I've been building PCs since 2004 and I don't think I've ever seen a shortage that wasn't tied to an actual chip production problem — this one's purely a demand thing, invented out of nowhere by a currency that didn't exist a decade ago. Kind of a strange thing to type out loud, honestly.
If anyone local has a 580 or a 1060 gathering dust and wants to make a fair trade, my inbox is open. Otherwise I guess I'm rendering everything on integrated graphics until the market decides it's done being ridiculous.