Daemon Grotto

The past few years have been a roller coaster for retail computer hardware prices. 2016-2019 was the peak of good deals on GPU power with the GTX 10 series and the first crypto crash. We have not surpassed that benchmark since then. Let that sink in: the GTX 1080 and 1080ti are still roughly the price/performance king six years later. The RTX 3060 and 3060ti offer the same performance per dollar as the cards released more than half a decade ago. The original RTX Turing release (the 20 series) was more of a distraction for the fact that GPUs were not getting more power per dollar like we had for the generations preceding them. “Look at the ray tracing! Tensor Cores!” We seem to be in a computer age of diminishing returns. Stagnation.

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!

GTX 1000 series was the peak of gaming gpus. RTX 3000 was promising, but it left a bad taste when crypto mania began and they were impossible to get at MSRP. I feel sorry for anyone that HAD to get a gpu in 2021-2022. RTX 4000 is a bust for anyone that wants to upgrade to anything less than rtx 4070. Even then you can argue that used / amd options are better value than a 4070

I also find that the 4070 is the only nvidia gpu worth upgrading to these days. It's almost twice as powerful as the 1080 for the same 200 watt power limit. Otherwise, I'm sticking with used parts.