In general it's an amazing time to be a computer hardware consumer. There's real competition in pretty much every primary component hardware vertical. The spinning rust data storage market has been uniquely crappy of late.

The sketchy stuff shows up in cheap components with slim margins (budget AIO watercoolers, budget hard drives, budget PSUs budget/no-name ebay video cards).

Eh. Or any kind of complex module/system like a laptop. I will agree that desktop hardware tends to be decent to shop for if you’re not trying to be a complete cheapskate. I built a desktop just like most other people during the lockdown and it wasn’t as bad as buying laptops trained me to expect.

There isn't a lot of competition on GPU's, which happen to be one of the most expensive components.

That market is basically just Nvidia (80%+ market share and still dominating in performance/features).

> That market is basically just Nvidia

I'm typing this on a machine with a fairly powerfull AMD GPU. The market for Nvidia is basically just Nvidia, everyone keeps using their special APIs. Their cards are not significantly more powerful than what AMD offers and their drivers suck because they're constantly using them for anti-competitive crap.

> The market for Nvidia is basically just Nvidia

It's over 80% of GPU the market.

> Their cards are not significantly more powerful than what AMD offers

AMD can't compete with Nvidia's high end. Especially with the new 30XX series, which crush the performance of Nvidia's 20XX series.

> and their drivers suck because they're constantly using them for anti-competitive crap.

Their drivers have a lot of features that AMD doesn't, like G-Sync, DLSS, RTX and others.