A look at Micro Center's website shows this text under each 1080Ti: "UNAVAILABLE ONLINE"

A successful miner is likely to buy way more than a handful of cards.

Yup, most of the current generation GPUs, from AMD and NVIDIA, are out of stock in Romania, or are being sold at almost double the price.

During the black friday sales, I bought a Sapphire AMD RX580 8GB for 1400RON(~310€). It wasn't cheap, but considering the situation at the time it was a steal. Now the cheapest one available, and the only one I've found, is 3000RON(650€).

This is utter madness.

Wow.. with 1,600$ you could buy an entire computer (I mean a good one) plus a good new monitor..
I waited forever to get my GPU, but I'm glad I did it before this absurd situation..

Exactly. Fatz, buy a card that's just good enough to play the games you like to play, and wait for the prices to normalize.

To add to the insult, Nvidia didn't announce anything about Volta/Ampere for consumers at CES 2018 , so they will keep milking people for the time being.

Is it the chip makers, the card manufacturers, or both, that are making all the extra cash from the heavy demand? Also, I've heard part of the issue has to do with a memory shortage.

Why should they? The GTX 1050 and 1050Ti beat anything in their price range. Even before miners bought everything the GTX 1060 was enough to compete with the RX 580. The 1060 has the same performance, is cheaper and needs less energy. My tiny EVGA 1060 SC with a single fan competes with the tripple-fan 580 Red Devil that barely fits into my case (and is pretty noisy and hungry). The 1070Ti (it's an old chip) is cheaper and faster than Vega 56. And Vega 64 is a complete desaster that we don't even need to talk about! You better get a 1080 OC or a cheap standard 1080Ti. AMD is currently no real competition for Nvidia. Nvidia's old stuff (GTX 10xx is pretty old by now) is still better than AMD's new stuff. It's a known architecture that's pretty "cheap" to produce (they don't produce a lot of broken chips anymore).

Nvidia is in an even better position than they were during the last generation (GTX 9xx vs. R9 3xx). AMD's old cards were cheap and if you gave them enough power their performance was near Nvidia's. Now AMD is overpriced and doesn't offer any room for OC. Nvidia is safe for 2018.

I thought it was AMD cards that miners used (Ethereum). I guess not.

I read about the issue with the memory shortage, it's because a lot of flash goes to smartphones. I don't think Nvidia or Amd make extra cash from the abnormally high prices with the exception of their reference cards, I suppose card manufacturers and resellers make the most of it. And I really believe a lot of them arecplain scammers because they had hoarded a lot of stuff when it was cheaper and now release it at the higher prices, just like it happened with RAM , they had bought all the stock they could when 16GB was $80 and created a fake shortage that raised prices

Yep... But there are no more AMD cards. They're sold out. So it's either Nvidia or nothing.

There's that and if you wanna run FFXV at good settings, you basically NEED a 1080 ti. I got lucky. Ordered my card when it showed up for pre order on newegg and paid MSRP plus taxes. Avoid miners and do the same thing but you gotta be as fast as a blue hedgehog to get it. That or cryptocurrency crashes. HARD

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I won't. If an adult chooses to gamble with money they already know they can't afford to not have in their pocket and loses the shirt off their back because "I'll definitely earn big" then it's their own damn fault.

Different cards do well with different coins and unfortunately there's far too many coins.

Again?