I’m disappointed that a 3060 – a 60 class card – costs almost twice what I paid for a GTX 960 back in 2015. Gone are the days of good deals for new GPUs for the foreseeable future.
As for the used market, that’s an entirely different story right now. Crypto is finally crashing and the great GPU sell-off has already begun on Ebay. The best deals to be found are on AMD gpus, like the 6600 and 6600 XT. Going with Team Red has been a two-edge sword for awhile now. They have driver issues. They still have driver issues on anything older than the newer 6000 series. I say that because I don’t know anyone who has a 6000 series card. Maybe they’ve been fixed? Really, AMD cards have only been truly feasible on the Linux operating system because the open source drivers work so well – way better than NVIDIA. Windows is a shit show for AMD drivers.
Perhaps I should snag a 6600 sapphire card to see if the situation has improved? At the rate they’re going, they should be easy enough to acquire for under $200 very soon. I don’t really need it, but I’m curious. It’s a shame to see AMD/ATI getting utterly crushed by Nvidia lately, especially if the cards are decent.
AMD’s other business – CPUs – have been doing very well by comparison. So well in fact, they’ve been raising prices on the 5000 series of chips over previous generations. Like the GPU market, the budget segments have been completely ignored, so there haven’t been many options for those looking for a good deal the past two years. Thankfully, this situation changed somewhat in April with the release of a new round of cheaper Ryzen CPUs. The Ryzen 5 5500 looks like a very good deal for the power it provides. Intel has some good options on the low-end as well.
That’s all of my observations about the PC gaming hardware market as it stands now. Hopefully the crypto crash will allow prices to continue trending downwards. Rather, hopefully there will be some cool games to justify the expense of new gear in the first place!