This is the last GPU update for 2021
And oh my gosh, have we saved the absolute worst and the best for last.
Hi, welcome back to PC Builder. I'm Jason, pour yourself a stiff drink
because the market is still a mess.
But what does 2022 hold for us
It isn't going to get better? Well, we'll go through that.
I think it will It's all about the timing.
If you get value this video remember give it a like it makes a big difference to the
channel.
He really appreciates it, and we're about to hit 100,000 subscribers.
So click that subscribe and the bell icon that
We you get notified when we release new content with that.
Let's jump into it. Let's jump straight into the Tom's Hardware,
eBay average GPU price tracking
and you can see if you want an NVIDIA graphics card the final data from November
which includes Black Friday is terrible,
is absolutely terrible just as I said
it was going to be urge you if you want one of those GPUs
to pick it up earlier this year.
Don't wait for prices to go up sadly they did.
However, the opposite is actually true for the Radeon GPUs.
So let's just quickly we go through this.
So if you wanted an RTX 3090,
you were paying 7% more.
Now, you're paying an average of $2936.
I think this prices continue to go up throughout the December holiday.
And of course if you want the 3080 TI, The 3080,
these are all gone up, They've gone up by at least,
three anywhere to 10% depending on the GPU.
However, with the Radeon graphics cards, and the reason you see these prices,
highlighted in yellow is because I actually have not used eBay pricing for them,
because they are now widely available on Newegg and
other sites in the United States without having to buy any kind of combo with them.
So for instance if you want to get an RX 6600 you can you don't have to buy this
as a motherboard combo anymore.
And you certainly don't have to use Newegg Shuffle.
You can just go out and buy it for ya $560.
I'm not saying the price is good,
but no longer do you have to jump through hoops to get them and honestly,
the RX 6600 XT is probably the better deal it $620.
Not too much more for quite a bit more performance.
Similarly, with all the Radeon RX 6800 XT, 6700 XT
Here You can see it $860 so on and so forth,
but you can go out right now
and buy these gpus and you can buy them for less than you're going to pay on eBay.
And yeah of course, the price is inflated,
but the overall pricing for these gpus for most of them has come down
the Radeon 6800 i could not find on any retailer only available.
Through eBay and at low volumes,
we'll just ignore that card for right now but as you can see,
the pricing is either flat or slightly negative that's actually a good trend.
I expected for the holidays everything to be wiped out
including the AMD graphics cards.
So, the fact that they're still there means we didn't get wiped out as bad as we thought,
we still had more supply than we thought and demand was not as intense as I feared,
and just taking a look at the graph.
Really quickly you can see the pricing has been flat since August,
except for the really expensive cards like the RTX 3090
which have just shot through the absolute roof,
but for everything else has remained relatively flat.
So, let's talk about the demand.
A lot of Gamers would just say screw it. I've waited long enough.
I waited over a year I'm going to go out
and buy a graphics card and I'm just going to get discounts
on other components in order to make up for the price.
And certainly a lot of folks did they did build PC’S and congrats,
if you were one of them, it's been a tough time.
I know, But congrats if you actually finished your PC build finally.
But who's really buying the graphics cards
Well, it's primarily Ethereum miners and it starts out like this.
This is a great story on their rented Ethereum channel.
Yes This person start off by buying to RTX 3070s
and then they built a rig
and at first it was small time and then they added a couple more cards to it.
The next thing you know, they had four cards, then they had five,
then they had a whole rack then it to racks full of cards.
And then they had three racks full of cards
But this is this is and now they're buying 3090s.
This is the way that theory mining is going
and I would actually call it and look at this.
Now they've got a ton of Ethereum this is a story that has repeated itself over and
over
and let's not forget their entire warehouses of graphics cards.
They're doing nothing other than mining primarily Ethereum right now.
That's where all of this is.
So we got over before this is all being driven by the price of Ethereum .
This is the primary GPU mineable currency it accounts for 95% of the GPU.
Mineable market cap out there. The Other cryptocurrencies that you
might have heard of that you can mine with a graphics.
Remember Bitcoin you mind with an Asic miner it's very different.
But the other guy, the other coins that you mind with a graphics card like Raven coin
and others.
They are very very tiny compared to a theory.
Right now It's at $4126,
is we know the price spiked up starting about this time last year
spike the ball the way about 4,000 in about in May dropped to about 1700 in june-july.
That's when Graphics car prices started to come back down.
And we were very excited. Unfortunately.
They made some changes to a ethereum mining itself
and how they get paid and that spiked the the value of the currency up to where it is
right now,
which is well, over 4,800 in early November,
but it has stagnated between around of about 4,000.
It's 3,700 to 4100 and that stagnation has occurred at the same
time that the difficulty of mining Ethereum.
In use to rise Ethereum has a built-in mechanism to stop hyperinflation.
Otherwise, everybody would just jump on there with a zillion graphics cards,
and they mine it and get a zillion Ethereum
and it would be worthless because it would hyper inflate the currency.
So what they do is every time another graphics card gets on the market
and on the network and starts mining.
It becomes harder and harder.
And you can see the difficulty going up here from this time last year about,
you know, 3600 to all the way to 7800 in May.
And now it's well over 12,000 and that is an insane amount of difficulty.
That means the RTX 3090 that you bought to add
and do mining on back in the beginning of this year is
getting way way less in terms of profitability.
In fact, let's take a look at that profitability right now.
The profitability stands about six dollars and ten cents per per 24 hours.
That's a daily profit for in RTX 3090 when we looked at this,
When Graphics car prices were falling in the summer.
It was about six dollars and 48 cents.
Now, as I hit refresh here. I know you can note that the price of Ethereum
when I started filming this with $3900 dollars it's now $4100
just underscores, how volatile Ethereum is It bounces hundreds of dollars each day,
but it's been in this in this kind of comfortable band of about four thousand dollars
as long as it stays there and as long as more miners,
keep adding cards onto the network, which they're doing at an insane rate still,
even though it's not profitable to do. So many people have been sucked into this bubble,
that they're just going bonkers and buying graphics cards.
This is going to continue to go down and down.
So, even if nothing changed with Ethereum,
just the overall difficulty would start dragging the price of these graphics cards down eventually.
When are things going to change?
Because I truly believe that 2022 is going to launch a golden age of PC.
Building as hard as things have been, they're going to be that good on the other side
and let's go through quickly why?
No one AMD, NVIDIA and Intel are going to launch graphics cards
and especially they're going to launch them at the low end where we've had no cards whatsoever.
And it's forced low-end buyers to compete meet with mid-range
buyers who then compete with higher end GPU buyers
because there's been no graphics cards for them.
And that's hurt everybody. Even if you don't want a budget graphics card,
the lack of a budget graphics card Market has forced those folks to come up
and compete with you for the higher end graphics cards and it has Helped nobody whatsoever
AMD and NVIDIA have made record profits.
Because these are the highest margin cards but AMD and at least as reported by folks,
like Moore's Law is dead, maybe realizing that.
Hey, this has been a bad strategy for us because our graphics cards are sitting on shelves.
Right now, as I showed you a new way. You can buy them right now.
They are available. But the problem is that people want
NVIDIA graphics cards AMD has abandoned the low
and where it typically Did really well.
Now they're realizing Oh my goodness. What have we done
So, they're preparing to flood the markets as I hear with the RX 6500 XT.
Let's see if they deliver a similar amount of volume that they did for the 6600 line.
Then I think we're going to be in really good shape.
The other thing, obviously is Intel's getting into the graphics card business
and they're going to bring a lot more volume.
Yes. It's still being produced by
tsmc but this is tsmc production that may have gone to
like apple silicon or something else instead and it's going to be used to produce graphics
cards.
So the overall production of gpus is going to go up,
that is a great thing. And of course NVIDIA is going to launch some new cards.
We won't get into all that
because mostly they're just going to be rebranded cards
NVIDIA to figure out how to squeeze out another couple hundred dollars out of you
when you go to buy a graphics card,
and I don't really feel like giving them any more air time for that right now.
What is the other and probably the more major thing that's going to happen is Ethereum by
June of 2022
is going to move to what's called proof of stake.
It's called the merge that means GPU mining is going away.
And as they are 95 percent of the overall GPU mining Market,
that means 100% of the miners are going to be fighting over again,
five percent of the overall profits.
So, GPU mining as we know is going to get destroyed,
which is great for gamers
because those are the folks who are buying up all the freaking gpus right now,
so that's Going to happen in June.
Now. How close are they because yes I know people will say,
well Jason, they've said this before they have said this before,
but they have never actually been this close to actually physically
having in the infrastructure in place to do the merge.
So they just launched the public test net.
The way you can think about this, is that Ethereum went from an alpha
an internal Alpha where they launched,
this at a conference. A couple months ago to they went to a closed beta
where they were just doing these different test nets.
To Now they have a public test net that anybody can jump into.
So, if you think about this like a game launches,
first you go, the clothes, the alpha that's close and you go a closed beta,
and then you go to the open Beta just before you're ready to launch is.
So you can find and kill any of those last-minute bugs.
And then, of course, if you're doing something like Battlefield 2042,
you launch it with bugs anyway, the Ethereum folks are a little bit more careful than that.
So that means they are very,
very close to this thing going live because they are now at what we can.
Call a public beta test,
the open beta test. So the merge is coming.
The difficulty bomb, which will end mining one way.
The other is set to go off in June.
Could they punt that again? Yes, of course, they could I don't want to
make it sound like they can't they just did punt it.
It was supposed to go off in December. I believe this time they have
everything in place to actually go forward with a merge
and they said that they will make a decision
on the timing of this by February of 2022 around February of 2022.
So what is it going to mean
for the graphics card Market when Ethereum actually goes through with the Merge.
It's going to be more than just a reduction of demand.
You're actually going to see a tidal wave of use graphics cards.
How many use graphics cards? Let me show you and let's try an estimate.
So right now, if you look at the total hash rate on the Ethereum network,
that's all the hashing power out there.
It's 930 Tera hash, now that's kind of hard to think about,
right but what if we put it in terms of The graphics cards that was
So 930 Tera hash becomes nine hundred thirty thousand Giga Hash
becomes 930 million Mega hash
and graphics card power is typically expressed in mega hash per second.
So for instance, if we looked at our TX 3090 that has 114 Mega hash per second.
So if you divide 930 Million by 114,
you find that there are about 8 million graphics cards
RTX 3090 Graphics cards worth of hashing power out there.
Now, there are obviously not all RTX 3090s
These are not all 1660 supers
but this is just a kind of a dumbed-down way of thinking about it
so that you we can wrap our heads around it because these numbers are so big,
if those are RX 580s,
that's 30 million graphics cards of RX 580s worth.
So you can see depending on what kinds of graphics cards are out there.
And, of course, there's also how much of that is ASIC mining vs
Graphics card mining. I think 50% would be way too high.
But just to humor the miners out there.
They're going to give me a hard time down in the comments. Sure.
Let's say that 50% are ASICs that's still 15 or 16 million
GCX 1660 supers worth of graphics cards out there.
Mining now. It's probably quite a bit more than that.
So you can see there is going to be an absolute flood because these folks,
the miners are going to have nothing else to do with those graphics cards,
except sell them off and try and get some value back for them.
So let's play everyone's favorite. Should you buy now
Or should you wait? Well, again,
most of the changes we're talking about are going to occur in the second quarter of 2022.
And remember, even when the Ethereum goes to the merge,
some of those miners might hold on those graphics cards.
Just hoping against hope for a month.
Or so before reality begins to set in and we see a lot of panic selling,
maybe the Panic selling will even begin earlier than that.
It all depends on how many miners really start grappling with.
Oh my gosh GPU Mining is going away.
Do I want to Until I can't get hardly any value out of my rig
or do I want to sell earlier than that
and try and beat everybody else
and maximize my value and remember you don't have to buy a used graphics card.
I'm not telling you you're going to be forced to buy a use graphics card, I know last time,
I said that old people freaked out. "I don't want to buy use Graphics card".
It's going to depress the prices of the entire Market
because you're going to have a flood of Supply
because there will be people out there willing to pay $300 for an RTX 3080.
a used RTX 3080 and say,
Hey, what the heck It's only 300 dollars,
the new 3080s aren't going to sell for as much.
It's going to depress the whole the pricing of the whole Market,
which is a good thing for gamers at the same time Intel and AMD
are going to be delivering a lot more volume to the market.
So it's going to be as perfect as storm as it has been against gamers in 2021.
It's going to flip and it's going to be that perfect storm in 2022.
And I think, June July August is going to be a fantastic time to build.
a New gaming PC. So if you're thinking about waiting and you can hold out for the next,
I'd say seven months until the middle of 2022 that is going to be, to me, the best
time to think about building a brand new gaming PC
and you'll probably be able to save quite a bit of money doing it.
If however, the timing is more important to you and you can forgo a little bit of the
cash.
Again. We're talking about a couple of hundred dollars.
So if the timing is more important to you than by all means by now,
and I would recommend mend getting an AMD graphics card
because they are available right now for not the worst prices.
If you're a budget Builder, looking to build a budget gaming rig,
you may actually be able to build earlier than that.
Will see again AMD, Intel, and maybe even NVIDIA are going to launch low and graphics
cards.
And at the same time, we're going to see the first low-end CPUs
that we've seen in almost two years now,
so, it's might be a perfect storm for Budget Builders earlier in the year.
If you want to build more of a mid-range to high-end system and do it in an MSRP.
You're probably going to be looking at July or August.
So if you do want to build right now, what should you do?
I would recommend getting an AMD graphics card from somebody
Like Newegg, you can now at least in the United States.
You can buy these graphics cards without having to bundle them.
That's phenomenal. You can now put together any platform,
you want not get locked into whatever cruddy motherboard that Newegg wants to ship with
you.
Now, if you want, you can still get the combos, but it's only like $5 off.
So I wouldn't do it. I would stick with the choice.
Buying a prebuilt gaming PC is still the best value option at many price points,
especially at the high end If you want on RTX 3000 Series card,
I would strongly recommend getting a prebuilt
because the system integrators
and the oems get the cards far far cheaper than you do
and they get all the rest of the components far far cheaper than you are.
I do now, I again I hope that eight months from now we're talking about
building a PC still makes more financial sense and by a prebuilt.
But at least in this environment, it doesn't outside of the ultra Ultra cheap things.
You're going to build like a 5600G kind of PC.
So I recommend my best pre-built gaming PC video.
I go through this and down here in the video description.
I keep a list of all the best deals.
One of those deals right now is that I think is phenomenal is RTX 2060 with an i5 11400F,
A good air cooler on it right there overall 16 gigabytes of memory thousand dollars,
but you can Find these kinds of deals
and I dig them up and I regularly change out that list in that video.
The other thing to look at is, of course, getting a gaming laptop recently
updated by best gaming laptops 2021 video where I go through
and I go through how to buy it.
I include like the tgp and how to understand all that.
And then of course, I make my recommendations down here
and I update this on a on a regular basis as well.
If you don't like my video, go find somebody else's but there are options available.
If you're if you decided that building a PC right now is simply Beyond
you but you still need something.
These are actually pretty good options. And of course,
if you are trying to get an RTX graphics card, NVIDIA graphics card
Newegg Shuffle continues to be the primary way at least in the US.
You're going to get one other than buying it. Straight from eBay or a secondary seller
site.
It's interesting. They're actually, they're actually shuffling off DDR5 memory right now.
So gosh, poor Intel and they're,
and they're Alder Lake launch. I know they had high hopes for this,
but they really been done in by early adopter issues and this DDR5 shortage.
Anyway, if you're looking for a graphics card new,
a shuffle is still the way to get NVIDIA graphics card.
Remember, if you got value the video give it a big like it makes a huge difference,
especially to this guy right here and we're just hitting 100,000 subscribers.
Come on join us, Click that subscribe button and the bell icon.
That way you get notified when we release new content.
What did you think about our 2021 a last GPU update of the year
Are you excited for 2022?
Are you excited to finally be able to
Buy a GPU at MSRP later in the year?
Oh my gosh. What are we going to do
So with that we will catch you on the next one.