Monday, July 10th 2017
No End to GPU Supply Woes: Germany Supplier Hit by Shortage, Pulls Cards
There seems to be no end in sight for current high-performance, discrete graphics cards' supply constraints. If you've been looking for a specialized graphics processing unit to push eye-candy on your favored 3D experiences to the max, you've probably been having trouble for a while now. It all stems from a crazy, dizzying wave of cryptocurrency mining. And the fact that this mining spree has already taken global mining power consumption to levels close to a 17 million population country, as one of our editors puts it, kind of has a human problem. And it would seem that not even NVIDIA and AMD's partners' attempts to sate current miners' appetite for profit-generating graphics cards has put a dent on demand.
Now, one of Germany's most relevant retailers, MindFactory, has sent out an email to Tom's Hardware responding to inquiries relating to an apparent lack of stock on high-performance GPUs. And get this: they're expecting new stock in "at least three months". That's how long the retailer is estimating meaningful supply might be available again: in three month's time. Specifically, MindFactory said that "In fact we ordered the GPU's but because of the high demand on the RX and GTX graphic cards which is related to BitCoin farming the manufacturer can not give us a delivery date. We expect a delivery time of at least 3 months. This shortage affects the whole of Germany, maybe even whole Europe. "
Well, this editor can attest that yes, Europe is definitely being affected. Even in my own country, tiny Portugal, westernmost country of the European Continent, there have been shortages on RX 570 and 580 graphics cards on some of the most renowned digital stores. This phenomenon has come to stay, folks. Just hold on to your horses, and do your best to endure it.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
42 Comments on No End to GPU Supply Woes: Germany Supplier Hit by Shortage, Pulls Cards
If amd/nvidia started flooding the market with cards that could be used for mining, diffuculty would skyrocket making my 6 cards less effective pulling the cash down.
As is is looks like difficulty will be manageable till the next round of cards appear.
BTW I game on my 390, so I'm cool there. Might drop the 1070 in the gamer soon though. Best of both worlds?
"There's no reason they shouldn't be able to keep up with demand..."
Armchair quarterback.People, here is one of the people driving up GPU prices, speculators. They hurt legit people trying to buy a mid range card to game because they want to make a profit and make you pay more. All your money are going in to his pockets.
Edit: Strolling around and laughing in someone's face about how they've got 10s, 100s, or whatever number of GPUs isn't going to make miners friends and they should realize this. No one is obligated to be nice to them beyond not breaking the rules of a site.
I'm not saying miners don't have a right to buy the cards. I'm saying I get why people are upset about reasonable options being limited or gone and the miners should be able to see that too.
I remember the first Bitcoin mining fever, and that time AMD card really had an advantage for this workload, but it didn't make any impact on AMD's revenue since the volume is simply too low.
The person who did so speak up for the reason as to why.