Right now, looking for a great graphics card at a decent price can be a real pain. Why? Given that both AMD and Nvidia have teamed up with OEMs to produce graphics cards dedicated to cryptocurrency mining, it’s easy to point fingers at these digital miners for the graphics card shortage. And while that’s entirely possible, it’s not the full story. So we dug into Amazon supplies for a window into the shortage.
Disclaimer: Not every aspect of the graphics card shortage is attributable to physical supply. Many cards just aren’t sold through Amazon. For instance, EVGA’s portfolio of 70 GeForce GTX 10 series cards is reduced to 53 separate models served up through the popular online retail outlet. Out of the reduced batch, Amazon itself had only 15 cards in stock, with the remaining 38 models sold through its third-party sellers during our investigation.
That said, if Amazon has a graphics card in stock, it will normally sell the unit at the manufacturer’s suggested price. In our investigation of the graphics card shortage, there were rare instances where Amazon actually sold cards at slightly increased prices. There were also many units that actually had a reasonable discount. Another tactic we saw was that Amazon would increase the manufacturer’s price by $30 or so, then mark it back down to the normal price at a “reduced rate” exclusively for Prime Members.
Thus, Amazon customers looking for a good price on the best graphics card have to grab one while they’re still sold directly by the retailer. Otherwise, it’s a pricing free-for-all with its third-party sellers. Prices can inflate by more than 100 percent, and that can be costly the higher up customers go on the graphics performance totem pole. The biggest mark-ups are tacking hundreds of dollars to video card prices.
To get a better visual idea of the graphics card shortage, take a look at these tables:
As the numbers show, the Radeon RX 500 and Buy at Amazon cards manufactured by Asus and listed on Amazon are currently mostly sold through third-party sellers. In fact, Amazon’s stock of RX 500 Series cards is extremely low, thus customers are forced to purchase these cards at inflated prices through its third-party sellers, or look elsewhere online for (hopefully) a better deal.
However, in our investigation, we noted that Amazon’s stock mostly resided in the cheaper, low-powered card market. Gigabyte’s listed Radeon RX 550, GeForce GTX 1050, and GeForce GTX 1050 cards were plentiful. MSI’s low-end GTX 1050 Ti and GTX 1050 cards were mostly in stock, too, along with solutions from Zotac. Interestingly enough, Amazon had plenty of Zotac GTX 1080 cards in stock as did MSI and EVGA, which are at the other end of the performance spectrum.
Ultimately, the cards mostly hit, it seemed, were the GTX 1070, GTX 1060, RX 580, RX 570, and RX 560. Their suggested retail prices range from $100 to $400, making them great upgrades for the money when they’re actually sold by Amazon. However, the GTX 1070 cards manufactured by Gigabyte and sold through Amazon’s third-party sellers, for example, were jacked up in price between 33 percent and 82 percent, such as the G1 Gaming 8G selling for $780 (typically $430).
Here are the prices of baseline graphics cards listed on Amazon, which we will refresh each week. Right now, certain OEMs don’t even have listings for a specific GPU on Amazon, but we’ll leave space for them anyway in case a product does show up.
The graphics card shortage stems from the cryptocurrency mining crowd, which appears to be consuming GTX 1070 and GTX 1060 cards along with AMD’s batch of Radeon RX 500 Series cards. These cards offer a lot of bang for the buck, and cryptocurrency miners understandably want the best value, because it improves the efficiency of mining coin for profit.
We’ve started to see companies offer graphics cards for mining digital currency. These typically have less impressive coolers than gaming cards, and often don’t have video output ports, because they’re not needed for mining. However, these cards remain rare, so a lot of demand is still focused on gaming cards.
A recent downturn in the price of Ethereum, an upstart currency that gained popularity over the last six months, has brought some hope that demand will decrease. However, Bitcoin remains strong. It does appear that video card prices are slightly offer the peaks — but cards are still hard to obtain at MSRP, and there’s no immediate reason to expect relief.
Updated on July 26, 2017, by Kevin Parrish to reflect current prices.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.