On the flip side, RAM prices are good and SSD prices are amazing. But yeah, CPUs and GPUs are a gongshow. A lot of people are blaming scalpers, but I think it’s just demand is much greater than supply.

I'm honestly amazed at the PC component market for the past decade. The Thailand flooding that messed up HDD production, and crypto mining jacking up the price of GPUs, are just two examples

Second order effects of increasing centralization in pursuit of manufacturing efficiency.

It saves money to have everything co-located.

It also amplifies the magnitude of physical-world disruptions.

more efficient usually means more fragile

> SSD prices are amazing

They've been pretty much flat for the past 18 months. I've been wanting a 2TB SSD since 2018 and I've been watching the price sit stagnant at ~$250 canadian since june 2019 (dropped from ~$600 in the year before that).

Have you thought about used enterprise SSDs? White intermittent, I've picked up lower end 1.92TB drives for +/-$100.

It's just a want, not a need, so I haven't looked any further (just keep the occasional eye on the amazon price). May become a need (or at least, a financially-justifiable want) a few months after the google photos storage limit starts

Where do you find used enterprise hardware?

I intermittently check the Great-Deals subforum on the ServeTheHome forums. Most stuff is on eh4y, but sometimes it'll be on other sites.

EBay? I also see used enterprise hardware sold off Amazon.

Like Intel ones? hint: they are defective and all die. Its like buying used tires for your daily driver.

There are some, but also SanDisk, Dell (rebranded Toshiba), etc...

I've had pretty good luck with everything so far, knock on wood. The 1.92TB drives I mentioned are SanDisk CloudSpeed Eco II, and they have been pretty good. What's really impressed me are the Dell/Toshiba write-optimized 1.6TB drives I picked up. Pricey, but excellent performance.

I have a few I think 240GB Intel drives I picked up as well. They initially had some of the problems you're referring to, which for me was not showing up after a warm reboot, but they haven't done that for a while, so I'm thinking it may have been fixed by an OS update.

I do think logically, if supply is ample (greater than demand) than the return on scalper investment may drop below the point of being worthwhile. Transaction costs and the risk of no longer being the preferred direct retailer could result in scalping losing you money. As long as demand readily exceeds supply, having the in-demand item gives you the power to collect a greater price on that item.

If it's evenly matched, scalping would likely be a minor, potential problem, but not to the scale we're seeing on all of these gaming items.

Scalping disappears if supply matched demand (with perfect geographic efficiency). Buying from a scalper is strictly riskier than buying from a retailer (might not be able to return faulty equipment, etc). There might be exceptions for rare / limited edition items because then scalpers can potentially control the whole market and extract monopolistic profits (assuming the demand curve allows it).

Scalpers only exist when the true market price of something doesn't match the list price (Demand >> Supply). Graphics cards worldwide, microphones, at-home lifting equipment, USD in Venezuela... it's basically Uber's surge pricing but for products :)

The existence of scalpers implies demand outstripping than supply, so it’s the same thing.

Scalpers are also proving that companies can charge more. People laughed at the price of the AirPods Max, but they're selling very consistently and quickly on ebay for 750+

I think this is especially clear in nvidia GPUs. It would have been unlikely for nvidia to try doubling GPU prices for fear of the backlash and the risk of losing out if that wasn't countered by enough people willing to buy at the higher price.

But then the bitcoin gpu shortage happened and people were paying double for mid tier GTX 10xx cards. The shortage went away and prices went back to normal, but then the 20xx cards launched with a huge price bump, likely helped by the shortage scalpers proving how much people would pay.

Companies have other concerns than the immediate revenues though.

Consumers are very sensitive to price fluctuations, it might makes sense short term to raise the price when demand outstrips supply, but consumers will remember the companies that "gouged" them.

Apple maybe would be able to get away with it, but for big companies having stable price is pretty important.

> but consumers will remember the companies that "gouged" them

I don't think so... EA still sells a lot of games

That's likely solely because of supply-side constraints. Trying ordering AirPods Max on Apple's website right now, and you'll be informed of a 3-4 month ETA.

I don't believe Apple would want to charge $750/ea if they had ample supply.

Scalpers restrict supply by cornering the maket.

Is this actually happening? A bunch of people buying something for cheap and then immediately selling it for what the market can bear isn't cornering the market. For that you need a cartel (or a group of people acting in unison) buying the goods up, then hoarding it to drive up the price.

If the producers could produce more, scalping won't be possible.

Scalpers just appropriate the profit which the producers could make if they could afford it. Often they cannot because they declare a price at launch.

I'm humbly trying to upgrade from an i5-4670k to an i7-4790k (both of which are 7.5 years old) and it's a steal if you can find one for $150 + tax used on ebay. Madness.

I just got home from waiting for a 3080, got there over an hour before opening, and they still ran out before I could get one. This is something like >3 mo after release.

I had Microcenter build me a new PC a couple of months ago, and supply was only a problem for the very newest top-of-the line stuff. Everything else was okay. Since I didn't really need bleeding-edge, I had no issue.

In stock GPU selection at some European retailers:

OverclockersUK: 5700XT, 1050 Ti, 1030

Komplett.ie: GT 1030 and some random Quadro

computeruniverse.net: 1650 Ti, GT 710, RTX 3090 (for $2400)

scan.co.uk: Teslas, Quadros, GT 1030, GT 710, GT 210

That's it. No other RX 5000, no RTX 2000, no RTX 3000, no RX 6000.

So that's two of them don't even have gaming GPUs in stock, as an entire product category, and the others you get some last gen low end cards and one retailer with a 5700XT. It's a little more noticeable here.

> European retailers

Half of the ones you have listed are UK retailers.

I haven't checked the others but computeruniverse.net has various RX 5000 series GPUs in stock. So does mindfactory.de at the moment.

The new RX 6000 serious GPUs have been selling out quickly but they were just released this/last month and new stock does keep popping up.

They list 5600XT, card slower than Nvidia 4 year old 1070, at 350 Euro. 220 Euro for a 5500, slower than 4 year old 1060, slower than $160 MSRP 1650s. But wait, there are no 1650s in stock, and no 1060, and no 1070. There is 1660 Ti however, $280 MSRP, listed at 410 Euro .... thats almost twice the msrp for a 2 year old product.

The only products they havent run out of are listed at 2x the markup.

I tried to order a custom desktop with a rtx2070 this November from a dozen sellers. Everyone said they had problem with their own suppliers and I should expect to wait until mid January or buy at something like 800 euros for that card. Insane (I just took a xbox series s instead).

This seems like a huge failure to correctly price products if there are actual shortages and people standing in line (except maybe on launch day, that might be good publicity). The gaming market seems very elastic on the demand side, few people actually _need_ a new rig urgently, so an increase in price could effectively limit the initial demand and get them to people who need/want them most while increasing margins for manufacturers or sellers.

As it is now private middlemen take that profit, presumably by standing in said lines wasting a lot of time. And buyers now have to trust some rando on ebay to actually ship a 2k$ graphics card. That is not an optimal outcome.

> This seems like a huge failure to correctly price products if there are actual shortages and people standing in line

Apple can’t afford the optics of launching a product at one price and then halving it a few weeks later.

There’d be angry op-EDs in Forbes, and the HN threads would be longer than the queues.

In Japan, a notorious and No1 import agency called "ASK" does this operation for video cards. They sets higher prices at launch (3060Ti/3070 is 30%-40% expensive than US' MSRP) and finally decreases the prices. As a result, now we can easily buy any 3060Ti/3070, and 3080 if you don't choose brand, but expensive. What's interesting here is that sold price in Japan is sometimes far cheaper than scalper's price in US.

What you're describing is called a Dutch auction.

Microsoft and Sony should have offered their new consoles using this method. Start at a very high price like $10,000, decrease the price until people start buying, resume decreasing the price when demand is satisfied, and repeat as needed.

Companies take a big brand hit if they increase prices to match their low output. Adidas, too, can sell Yeezys for $1000 a pop, but chooses not to. It also helps keep the hype for the products up.

My friend snagged a 3060ti because he was in line trying to get a 5900x amd cpu. He's selling it to me at cost thankfully otherwise I'd never get one.

Latest gen consoles cost as much as the approximately equivalent PC GPU. Worst time to build gaming PC ever.

I disagree, the latest consoles have a historically weak launch lineup and don't run the full steam library, mods and all. On a compute per dollar comparison, sure they are a fantastic deal, but in terms of gameplay experiences per dollar they don't do nearly as well. They are like locked down budget computers, and it's almost as hard to get them at msrp as gpus too.

Here's a much more nuanced view: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3596551/microsoft-xbox-serie...

I'd say I agree it's a terrible time to build a high-end PC system. But I'm also saying that based on idle searches for components. I bought most of my PC parts in April 2019, and my (mid-range $300) GPU in spring 2020, with no issues with availability.

But it seems like motherboards are 25-100% more expensive now, and we are still waiting on $200-300 graphic cards from this generation.

I do think, though, that comparing a relatively single-purpose item like a gaming console to a general purpose desktop computer is also going to have pros and cons on both sides.

I'd much rather be shopping for mid-range (or last generation but still quite performant) computer parts than trying to get one of the consoles right now.

Here in Europe I'd have to spend about 450-500 on 2060, which is a cheapest previous gen GPU. I reckon that gives you a decent 1080p experience, not more.

A PC is used for much more and has much more expansion capabilities. Not to mention my PC is better than any console even though the GPU costs as much as a retail PS5. If I was on the console upgrade cycle I could wait until PS6 to upgrade my computer. That's a portion of the PS4 cycle and all of the PS5 cycle for ~$1200 (no need to upgrade storage and other accessories for a new build).

People on the high end could even wait 2 console cycles to refresh.

This gen of console spec is exceptionally good vs PCs, see https://youtu.be/WebInZUvcGA

Indeed. I’ve considered selling mine though and buying one again when it all gets cheaper at some point.

I just built a new office PC for my lady as a holiday gift. Most components were pretty fairly priced but I paid way more than expected for a Ryzen CPU with the integrated Radeon graphics near the price point I wanted to keep the build at. It's still a great build compared to what I'm replacing but that CPU markup was a shock, and I'm happy to not have to add a GPU to the mix.

Everyone decided to wait to upgrade till the new gpu's were announced from what I can tell. I upgraded my mobo & cpu in october and the same cpu (ryzen 5 3600x) is about £50 more expensive and there doesn't look to me that many units available.

The 30 series was also just a much bigger jump in performance for price than the 20 series represented over the generation before that.

And the 10xx generation was on market for a long time, meaning a lot of people (like me) are looking for an upgrade.

I'd really like to do a CPU/GPU upgrade, but I've resigned myself to waiting for a while until things settle down.