Do you blame ethereum miners or graphic card manufacturers for the price hikes?

[Zak33]

I blame Crysis for not running on ANTHING properly for a Decade, so everyone had to find something else to use their new cards ;-)

Actually... I have another theory on this - I think that the Electricity/Power gen companies are winning more than anyone. As everyone moved to energy saving bulbs, LED everything, A+++ rated freezers, and even tumble driers using less electricity......and Ikea selling solar panels to the masses.....

they needed something......

and along came virtual currency

[Zak33]

you might want to buy one of these boards while you're worrying about it ;-)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B073BX57..._t1_B01M5FQZYE



when you start counting those PCI express slots, make sure you count grey and black and buy the leads to hold the cards in purpose build racks
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/kolin...cb-007-kk.html

[scaryjim]

For balance, you can get a similar board for AMD's AM4 socket too....

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Biostar-TA3...words=A320+BTC



although the Biostar version is slightly less insane than the ASRock one....

[Pob255]

This is my take on it, tbh. It's simply market forces. If you want a scapegoat you could try blaming capitalism, but that doesn't feel very productive or cathartic to me.

yep nail on the head, although I don't think anyone is making massive profits atm, amd and nvidia are the main ones I see having the greatest potential margins in the chain.

The one thing I am a little surprised at is that there isn't a bigger market for dedicated mining silicon - there's a lot of extra stuff of a GPU that I'm sure mining doesn't need; the fact that there aren't dedicated mining chips suggests to me that the market maybe isn't as big as people like to suggest, otherwise surely someone would've produced something cheaper that *only* does mining.

I think that the market isn't as large as some but as a part of the dedicated graphics card market and in a specific area in that market it is large.
Miners want very specific criteria from cards, unfortunately they require the same thing higher end games require and I'd not be surprised if the mining market is larger than the gaming market for some cards.

Also remember that AMD care enough about miners to spend the time and money to tailor drivers for mining.

As to "someone would've produced something cheaper that *only* does mining." There's only nvidia and amd left in the high end performance card market.
We've seen both do massive rationalisation of their chips so that the industrial and consumer chips are near identical, so there's no incentive to spend much time and money on a gpu/card design.
Also increased demand on the consumer grade cards does help boost sales

Besides, supply/demand of GPUs themselves is only one factor in pricing: there's a also global short supply on memory that's forcing prices up, and compared to 18 months ago the pound is seriously devalued. So looking to blame a single group of people for pricing is somewhat short-sighted...

This this and this again, the world is not full of simple questions with simple answers, more often than not if the question is simple then it's a semantic trap (which does include this thread title btw) complex issues involving numerous factors do not have simple answers.

Sort of related, Lisa Su appeared on CNBC’s Power Lunch and apparently cryptocurrencies only take up around mid single digit sales figures, if true, and there's no reason to doubt that it isn't, blaming the high prices on cryptocurrencies would seem to be incorrect, thoughts?

Please note she's talking about AMD sales as a whole, not just graphics cards, so I'm not surprised that a few high end gpu's make a tiny percentage of total sales.
Remember the cards that the miners want make up a small part of the gpu range, it just happens to be the same small part that games target too.