Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti Review: GK110, Fully Unlocked

[I3lood Eagle]

AMD has a problem with advertising, but they also have a problem right now with bitcoin mining. Well I guess it's now really a problem if you can mark up your cards 30-50% and still sell them, but they're losing fans and customers alike. EG: I was gonna get an R9 290, but they're marked up far beyond $400 which (was) a really great value for the card... now I'm having to look into the GTX 770 which is the only thing really in my budget area anymore. I feel as an AMD partial fanboy I got the shaft because they were too busy making money off of a niche community to think about their fans/long term consumers. I also feel like this will come back to haunt them.

 

[I3lood Eagle]

just in case you didn't understand, the aforementioned process has a "real world" name... it's called price gouging...

 

[rishiswaz]

AMD can set a msrp but it is the partners who sell and price the cards. Key word being manufacture SUGGESTED retail price, AMD really doesn't have a say in if they charge more than msrp

 

[I3lood Eagle]

AMD can set a msrp but it is the partners who sell and price the cards. Key word being manufacture SUGGESTED retail price, AMD really doesn't have a say in if they charge more than msrp

...But one thing they have changed is the card itself, they're basically steampressing them and shipping them... so now the current AMD cards are garbage because they're trying to fill quotas, I've seen VERY VERY bad things RMA's/Returns/DOA chips in boatloads... It just sucks man, and then if you look at any retailer basically the higher up the card the longer you have to wait some being 1-3 months... that isn't acceptable. I understand their isn't much AMD can do now but they should've waited until they were able to fill the quotas that they can't now... +10 for team Green for waiting them out...

 

[rishiswaz]

...But one thing they have changed is the card itself, they're basically steampressing them and shipping them... so now the current AMD cards are garbage because they're trying to fill quotas, I've seen VERY VERY bad things RMA's/Returns/DOA chips in boatloads... It just sucks man, and then if you look at any retailer basically the higher up the card the longer you have to wait some being 1-3 months... that isn't acceptable. I understand their isn't much AMD can do now but they should've waited until they were able to fill the quotas that they can't now... +10 for team Green for waiting them out...

Look at it this way: AMD designs the GPUs, Global Foundries produces the GPUs (on contract for however much per GPU), AMD gets them and then sells and distributes them to board partners (ASUS, MSI, Sapphire, etc.), board partners either use the reference design PCB or create their own PCB design for the board, the partners produce however many cards they can with the amount of GPUs they get. Now AMD sells the partners however many they can get based on how many they get from Global Foundries at any given batch, Global Foundries can only make X amount of chips with the amount of fabs and raw material (also limited by binning and overall yield per wafer). If the crypto guys buy all of the chips there is nothing AMD can do because they have a production contract but there is still only a limited amount of chips Global Foundries can produce and only a limited amount of boards that the partners can produce. Not AMD's fault at all, not really anyone's fault but the crypto guys for gobbling these up, the board partners are companies and a company's job is to make money so you can't blame them for taking advantage of the situation if there is a limited supply but a huge demand they can make some serious profits. The situation is bad and the price hikes are one of the few things keeping me from upgrading to a 290 as well, but no one on the production line can be blamed for that.

 

[Novuake]

AMD can set a msrp but it is the partners who sell and price the cards. Key word being manufacture SUGGESTED retail price, AMD really doesn't have a say in if they charge more than msrp

...But one thing they have changed is the card itself, they're basically steampressing them and shipping them... so now the current AMD cards are garbage because they're trying to fill quotas, I've seen VERY VERY bad things RMA's/Returns/DOA chips in boatloads... It just sucks man, and then if you look at any retailer basically the higher up the card the longer you have to wait some being 1-3 months... that isn't acceptable. I understand their isn't much AMD can do now but they should've waited until they were able to fill the quotas that they can't now... +10 for team Green for waiting them out...

You clearly have very little understanding of how the GPU industry works or just pure and simple supply and demand.

 

[nikoli707]

the rma/returns is because of the custom mining bios and 24/7 90% fan profiles compounded by high clocks and under volting and over volting. and it works for many. over on bitcointalk they talk about rma'ing every 1 out of 3 until they get the golden chips. they say their doing the gamers a favor because the gamers can get a basically brand new ok overclocking card for 10% off this way, i dont know if thats true though. its gotta be killing the board partners though.

 

[SessouXFX]

How are they helping the gaming community, if they're sending the worse of the batch back for RMAs? 10% off? Who do they think we are, 6 yr olds with nothing better to do? The way I see it, they're the cause of affordable cards being jacked up in price by $100-200 by the vendors, because of short supply. That measely 10% off won't make as much as a dent, compared to the BS mark up they've given all of us gamers.

 

[rishiswaz]

How are they helping the gaming community, if they're sending the worse of the batch back for RMAs? 10% off? Who do they think we are, 6 yr olds with nothing better to do? The way I see it, they're the cause of affordable cards being jacked up in price by $100-200 by the vendors, because of short supply. That measely 10% off won't make as much as a dent, compared to the BS mark up they've given all of us gamers.

They are not really thinking that they are helping, they are basically justifying what they are doing and for no cost effective reason gobbling up cards they don't need. A Butterfly Labs 300 Gigahash/second ASIC costs a little bit more than 2 290Xs and would (using US average power costs and current USD/BTC rates) give a profit of around 65 dollars per day letting them break even in 23 days (with no pool contributions). Now if we use 2 290Xs for Litecoin mining (not including power rates and again current USD/LTC rates) in the same 23 days (no pool contributions) we get 307 dollars so not even close to breaking even. I don't know the inner workings of Bitcoin/Litecoin/crypto currency but I know that 1400 in 23 days is nowhere close to 307 in 23 days. Now if I was to say put a 5% pool fee for the bitcoins (seems average) and a 1% pool fee on the Litecoin (seems average as well) that puts it out to breaking even on the ASIC in 24 days and more or less the same 307 in the same time frame. I don't know the intricacies of these systems but to me it seems like they would be better off with ASICs on Bitcoin as opposed to them hogging up AMD cards for Litecoin.