The volatility is the problem as it makes calculations unreliable but a year to cover your costs on a 2 year (if you upgrade to the latest graphics card every generation) or 4 year (if you go every second gen) life is a reasonable investment.

It's literally a ROI of 100-300%.

Or to put it another way it's similar to a risky stock with a compounding yearly return of 41% for four years.

Using a graphics card for mining that you have anyway is just gravy (apart from externalities which are another big problem).

As long as it's taking a year to pay for itself, have a look at bitcoin's change in value over any recent 12 month period.

I'm not really a crypto guy but mining in your downtime on a decent gpu is a pretty good gamble.

He bought it for Flight Sim it sounds like, the mining is just a bonus.

And Flight Simulator 2020 needs crazy specs if you want the pretty graphics at decent frame rates. I was planning on doing the mining on the side just to reduce how much it cost, but I'm mainly getting it for the pretty Flight Sim graphics.

Or looked at another way, with only a year of mining you cover your costs, and everything after that is profit. I don't GPU mine, but I can certainly see why people do.

2080ti's don't cost $2500.

???

Oh yes they do: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=2080ti

That's absolutely insane. I'm sure it's a nice card, but it's not worth three payments on my house.

Doesn't all this limit the game publishers as well? Surely someone who is currently developing a game has to consider whether or not to even care that something like a 2080 even exists, it might as well not.

And if games starts to be developed with older and slower cards in mind, to ensure that games can even play them, won't that hurt GPU sales in the future?

Scalpers prices are not retail. I have bought around 4 3070s/3080s all for under 1000 at actual retail pricing.

When even retailers have these prices, then those are the prices.

> I have bought around 4 3070s/3080s all for under 1000 at actual retail pricing.

How much time and effort did you spend to accomplish that?

I've signed up with multiple AIBs and Nvidia itself for months to get notified if anything I'm interested in gets in stock. Nvidia stopped selling directly in my region (Europe) a while ago, no AIB has notified me yet. Probably because I picked all the most affordable models, all of which are still more expensive than 3080 FE MSRP, while 3080 FE has not even an official retailer left in mainland Europe.

Sure, I could setup a whole range of alerts and spend all day hanging out in a bunch of discords to catch one of those super rare stock drops.

But tbh that's not the experience I'm looking for when I'm already willing to spend money: I don't want, and most people simply can't, having to organize the rest of their life around the possibility for a purchasing "opportunity" at any given moment.

I literally just refreshed this page like 5 times a day. That is it. 3070s pop up all the time.

https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/new/

You also need the rest of the machine to put it in.

Can't just buy a gpu and plug it into a wall outlet.

Used on Amazon is $2099.00