Something Wonderful - GPU

I had heard that the return to earth of some computer component's price was happening, but I hadn't thought much about it. Particularly the price of the most advanced GPUs. Damn crypto-miners were buying them by the pallet and leaving us regular folks to the scalpers.

And scalp us, they did. RTX2080 cards, list price about $700-850 would fetch $2K plus. RTX3080ti? Fuhgeddabout it. Insanity.

If you read the past posts, I built a Ghost Canyon NUC with a decent i9 CPU, and I way overspent for an Asus Dual-Mini GTX1650 card. It was a support nightmare (the fans ran 100% all the time, too loud) and ultimately Asus did me a solid and sent me an updated GTX1660 Super that fit my tiny computer.

But I always wanted the RTX2060 that was close to $2K street price when I assembled this.

Then, when doing the ritual of updating the graphics drivers, the Nvidia app said that GPU's had been restocked. Intrigued, I opened up Newegg, and holy cow, the Asus Dual Mini RTX3060 Ti is in stock, and available for $529. Not much of a premium over the $399 list price, and I will admit that my itchy trigger finger was tempted to just buy it.

Not only was it available, and in stock, and not ridiculously priced, a lot of full sized cards were available as well. And not at stratospheric prices.

I guess the coming change of Etherium moving from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake is causing the hoarding of GPUs for mining to become a thing of the past.

'Bout damn time.

As for me, I did some searching, and it turns out that the RTX3060 Ti is only marginally better driving my 1440p monitor, so not worth the $529 upgrade. If I had a 4k monitor, it would be a no brainer, but for what my rig is, it isn't enough of a bump.

So I stay with the GTX1660 Super.