Bitcoin Mining.

Yep, got the email today.

God damned miners.

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This was my biggest mistake back in November when I could have had a card. I'm building this as my last rig, and trying to future proof it as much as possible and so was trying to eke out ever bit of performance I could so I was always leaning toward the cards with higher clocks.

I actually got lucky. With tax, my 1080 ti was $813.96. Granted, I had to fight for my free game promo (release was right around when the promo ended) and a $20 price cut (it dropped by that after I pre-ordered). model of GPU is EVGA GTX 1080 ti FTW 3 gaming (it has EVGA's ICX tech as well). Last time I looked, it was $900 on newegg. If the OP is trying to maximize the duration of his new build, I would imagine he went latest gen intel for possible 4k use.

higher clocks inside a single item's line of SKUs don't matter for shit. there isn't a big difference with the possible exception of the lowest-end cards of that particular item's line of SKUs (and when I say item, I don't mean segment. I don't mean "vega 56" or "1080"), because usually those cards also have smaller coolers and probably smaller dimensions, with the smaller pcb usually having lower-grade components. other times, those smaller-scale cards will be their own items. in many cases, you could achieve some of those factory overclocks yourself. 20mhz will only get you another frame or two at most.

perfect times to buy are rare, and largely depend on when things decide to do a larger move. people who bought 7970s got a long run out of them. people who bought 770s or 780s not as much I don't think. with AMD back in contention in CPU, and Intel throwing more cores on everything to compensate, and Intel again putting focus on developing discrete GPUs, the future looks nebulous. we just had a launch of cards with a new type of graphics memory in HBM2 with the vega 56 and 64 cards, and this year AMD will launch a 7nm card codenamed navi. I think there's think that there will be some upgrading of sandy, and ivy era systems sometime in the future. I personally think that might take a little longer. I don't think there is a lot of keenness on upgrading whether there is a reason or not.

if longevity is your goal, you may not get it with a 1080 given the competition that has arisen in the past year and the trickle of newer technologies that were delayed and them wanting people on sandy and ivy and the ilk to upgrade. the consoles will refresh in another 3 years and you're probably gonna get a bump. not to mention VR still ambles forward, gaining a bit speed as it goes along.

the switch has sold really wide, and that will hold things a bit, but they'll abandon Nintendo the second it becomes fashionable like always.

point I'm making is, you might get 3 years out of a 1080, you might not before new stuff starts to shove it aside. it all depends, and it does look like things will get a bump of the likes that makes old cards have trouble in the next few years. if Intel follows through on its GPUs this time, that's gonna make a big difference as there will be three people in the GPU space instead of just the two.

anyway as I say all this I am reminded yet again of how I dislike hardware.

The MSI GeForce 1080ti Duke card was $739.99 (I know this because I had it wishlisted). And now the 1070ti version of it is $899.99! That shows what's happened to prices of GPU's.

And Newegg has a grand total of ONE 1080ti available... at $1,199.99.... for a PNY card!!!! This is getting nuts.

God damned miners.
LOL. Well, there are other what's called "crypto-currencies" but Bitcoin seems to be the one most people have heard (as of now anyway). Well, at least I know there's at least one more... begins with an E IIRC but that's ALL I can remember (if that's even correct lol)

Didn't you buy i7-8700K? Then don't worry, you have UHD 630 graphics. :P

Order your gaming Vault today, survive the bitcopalypse!

It's still a direct result of miners... but I think the other thing going on here (besides the miners buying a bunch of them) is that judging by the sheer number (and prices) of these available on e-bay a lot of people bought these with the intention of selling them. It's a risk (if the prices don't go up you're SOL) but given the past year and how GPU prices have spiked twice now... I really do think this is also playing a role in the unavailability of them. So miners and speculators are buying them and people who want to use them what they were manufactured for (gaming... or perhaps productivity) are SOL.

It is - the word you're looking for is Ethereum ;).

Ahh yes that's it! Thank you.

sorry to hear that you missed the good pricing point. But dont worry you are not alone with it - i bought my new system in the end of August and i also paid more than i would have had to pay in April for it because of the rise in RAM and GPU prices - despite the hardware "aged" another half year it was still more expensive - really absurd times right now. Felt really stupid for waiting half a year and not having the new rig and then paying more for it :D.
Usually you could have aobut a 30% discount if buying half a year later but the high demand for RAM and the GPU demand of the miners and also the "bad" product pipelines (meaning for example that VEGA couldn't really compete that much with the 1080/1080TI and Ryzen turned out to be a kinda "special" product and intel still keeping the best single core performance..)

Out of curiousity I had a look and the GTX1080Ti is indeed sold out in many shops and scarce in others but it can be found in Europe. Now importing yourself is quite the hassle with all that paper work (import declaration, tax refund, duties etc) but you could look for smaller shops than the gigantic ones like Amazon and Newegg.

Why not get a GTX1080 non-Ti? Is your monitor's resolution and refresh rate so high that nothing short of the best of the best can feed it in a satisfactory way?

Some shops are used to exporting and can make it a lot easier for you to buy from them.