Why You SHOULDN'T Build a PC in 2018! 😕[Should You Buy a CONSOLE!]

The Price of Graphics Cards: A Cryptocurrency-Driven Market

Now that's actually because you can use graphics cards, particularly those from the AMD side, to quote unquote mine these cryptocurrencies. What these graphics cards are able to do is they're able to search basically loads of combinations of letters and numbers, have strings, and try and find ones that match up to in taken chunks of Bitcoin more like corn or ethereal for example, which you can't mine people are then able to acquire those amounts of crypto currencies. Now you might think, a few people trying to get some Bitcoin on the cheap that's alright, that's not gonna affect things too badly, this is on an unprecedented scale. I'm aware, I sound like one of those newsreaders who's trying desperately to get as many ratings as possible, however it's true there's people with whole warehouses full of like AMD RX 4 or 5, 80s that are trying to mine these things and I think it was a government or a news outlet that actually said this could be massively contributing to global warming, which is perhaps a slight exaggeration, but to think it's got to that level is just completely bonkers.

There's now such a massive market for cryptocurrencies that people like Isis have drugs on the bandwagon and made motherboards that actually have loads and loads of graphics card PCIe slot connections on them to run as many graphics cards on one motherboard as possible. The CPU power isn't really an issue, you really care if it's a high power CPU and unlike in gaming, the graphics cards need the full bandwidth that slot can provide, they just need a connection to the computer. In fact, many people have been running graphics cards off like USB 3 ports on computers to cram as many GPUs into one system as they possibly can, those are the two main contributing factors as to why graphics card pricing has been ridiculous.

Begs the question, are you better off picking up a PS4 Pro or Xbox One X instead at this moment instead of a PC? You may well be, but you might be asking yourself, why hasn't the price on these just shut up as well now? There's a couple of reasons for that. Many companies do it in the aviation industry, airlines do it ahead of pricing so on stuff like memory, it's very possible I couldn't confirm any of this, that Sony or Microsoft will hedge pricing on memory, so they'll buy absolutely crap loads of this memory except price or make an agreement with a manufacturer to buy memory at a set price for the next year or 18 months. What that means is that if the price of memory goes down or in the aviation analogy, the price of plane fuel goes down, it means they still have to pay the price that they hedged it out, so they can be a bit of a lose-lose situation. However, if prices go up, they keep the lower prices and are able to offer better value to the consumer.

On the other hand, graphics cards, the graphics chips made by AMD for both the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and the X and Pro versions, are actually completely specialized graphics chips that are made specifically for these consoles. So, an agreement will open, we've reached no doubt in the negotiation stage between AMD and the console manufacturers to buy these graphics chips at a set price that then goes up or down accordingly each year. Cryptocurrency doesn't really affect that side of things, so would this bubble likely to burst anytime soon? Memory pricing are a 50/50 on if these allegations of price fixing do come to be true then a drop in memory pricing could be almost instantaneous in the next six months or so it could just be completely overnight.

However, there is a valid argument for high memory demand graphics cards on the other hand. Cryptocurrencies don't really seem to show any signs of slowing down, Bitcoin has lost quite a lot of value and quite a lot of interest recently but the other cryptocurrencies certainly haven't, and the interesting cryptocurrency is distilled there, the pricing is still absolutely ridiculous, and the amount of money that can be made is unreal. You can't blame really AMD or a video card manufacturer itself for this because often it's out of their control, it's often retailers that taking the piss out of you and not the graphics card manufacturers themselves.

Oh that's all it explains to everyone why pricing has been absolutely mental, and why so many of my bills have gone up by like 50% in price. It is a shame that prices are where they are however you can and moan at cryptocurrency miners all your life but if you had a thousand dollars sitting in your bank account lying just to be spent then the chances are cryptocurrency is not a bad investment to make if you know what you're doing.