by This post is created on February 15, 2021.
In this post, I will reflect upon a very interesting and a bit frustrating phenomenon that is currently occurring in the Graphics Computing Units (GPUs) market. GPUs have many applications. They are used for computer gaming, cryptocurrency mining, video and animation rendering, and scientific applications.
First I have to mention that I am not a gamer and I stopped playing computer games when I was 14. I realized that I need to study if I want to achieve something in life and I realized that excessive playing of computer games will lead to the waste of precious time. I need new GPUs since I am trying to develop a low-cost high-performance computer for scientific computing and for machine learning. Also, the idea is to create a computer that can pay itself off by mining cryptocurrencies.
However, it is practically impossible to purchase a high-performance GPU at a reasonable price. Here is an example. As Figure 1 below confirms, the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 GPU is $1499.
However, it is impossible to purchase this card and most of the high-performance cards at this price. For example, Fig. 2 below shows a screenshot of the Best Buy stock. All the cards have been sold out. Similar situations occur in other online shops, such as Newegg, Walmart, etc. All the GPU cards at reasonable prices are out of stock.
However, we can still purchase these cards, however, at astronomical and inflated prices. Figure 3 below shows that this card can be purchased for $3449.97.
Probably it is possible to buy this card at a lower price at eBay, however, the lowest price is at least $2500.
Who is responsible for this? Apparently, a group of individuals (also known as scalpers) and companies have purchased most of the cards and now they are reselling them at higher prices. Also, this shortage is also due to the cryptocurrency mining frenzy.
How to deal with this problem?
