Was the transition from Maxwell to Pascal as bad?

[Engr62]

I haven't been in the market for video cards for a long time--the last video card I purchased new was an MSI HD 7770 back in 2012 (not really gaming at the time, so the HD 7770 was fine). A couple of years ago, I purchased a used HD 7970, but after I decided to downsize my case, I sold it to buy something a little smaller (and not so power hungry). I actually haven't gamed much since the late 1990s/early 2000s (with my Voodoo2 SLIs and Voodoo3 cards) before the kids came along. The youngest is out of the house now at college, so recently, I thought I might test the gaming waters again.

Wow! What poor timing--with all of the mining and the (apparent) switch over in production from the 1060/1070/1080 to the next generation of cards, there is such a huge shortage, with the few cards available priced sky high. At Christmas, I ended up getting a used GTX 970 thinking it would tide me over, and it may well do that. But, it was just enough to give me the itch to get something a little better.

Since mining was going on--at least to some extent--with the Maxwell GPUs, was there a similar shortage & price spike when nVidia transitioned from production of Maxwell to Pascal? Or is mining just so prevalent now that this situation is unique?

I mean, if someone offers a 1080 in the For Sale forum at anything less than 2x the suggested retail price, it's like a feeding frenzy!

 

[Armenius]

I haven't been in the market for video cards for a long time--the last video card I purchased new was an MSI HD 7770 back in 2012 (not really gaming at the time, so the HD 7770 was fine). A couple of years ago, I purchased a used HD 7970, but after I decided to downsize my case, I sold it to buy something a little smaller (and not so power hungry). I actually haven't gamed much since the late 1990s/early 2000s (with my Voodoo2 SLIs and Voodoo3 cards) before the kids came along. The youngest is out of the house now at college, so recently, I thought I might test the gaming waters again.

Wow! What poor timing--with all of the mining and the (apparent) switch over in production from the 1060/1070/1080 to the next generation of cards, there is such a huge shortage, with the few cards available priced sky high. At Christmas, I ended up getting a used GTX 970 thinking it would tide me over, and it may well do that. But, it was just enough to give me the itch to get something a little better.

Since mining was going on--at least to some extent--with the Maxwell GPUs, was there a similar shortage & price spike when nVidia transitioned from production of Maxwell to Pascal? Or is mining just so prevalent now that this situation is unique?

I mean, if someone offers a 1080 in the For Sale forum at anything less than 2x the suggested retail price, it's like a feeding frenzy!

I was in the market when Litecoin took off, which was when Kepler Gen2 and Hawaii XT were launching. After reading reviews I had settled on an R9 290X, which I would have had if I could find one for $549. Every one I found was $700-$800, which if I had the money I would have just gotten a 780 Ti. Unfortunately I didn't have the money at the time, so I settled on a 780. Still, the only ones I could find were reference cards and those had limited stock too. I snagged a GTX 780 for $529.

Mind you, Bitcoin was only worth around $200 at the time, or only 1.4% of its value today.

 

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I just sold all 8 of my 1080s for $700 each yesterday. I know i could of got more, but i like to undercut and get better buyers -- i hate dealing with disputes / buyers remorse, etc etc. a 970 should hold you over until volta comes, but when that does. Every morning before work check your favorite retailers for preorders stocks. Early bird catches the worm When RX480s launched, i was first two preorder a couple because they were a huge improvement in efficiency over my power hungry 290xs

To answer your question, the 1000 series Nvidia were the first ones good at mining, prior to this it was hard to get AMD cards, which obviously drove all gamers into the arms of Nvidia and caused some shortages. So this is worse.