Cryptocurrencies Are Making It Impossible To Afford A Great Gaming PC

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How is cryptocurrency affecting the computer hardware market? originally appeared on Quora -the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Answer by Jae Alexis Lee, PC Hardware enthusiast, on Quora:

Right now, unless you have no other alternative, no one should build a gaming PC. If you learn nothing else from me today, take that bit to heart.

Cryptocurrency, a word that we dimly learned when the world started waking up to Bitcoin, has had an on-again / off-again fling with consumer PC hardware for the past several years. Right now, not only is it on-again, it’s ratcheted things up from casual fling to front page torrid affair.

What’s going on? When will the madness end? Is cryptocurrency on consumer hardware the power couple of 2018?

We’ve been here before

Let’s rewind the clock a little bit to the Autumn romance of 2013: Bitcoin is showing itself to be more than a passing fad and things are starting to feel real. 2013 was the year that you could buy things with cryptocurrency with retailers like Newegg stepping in and giving the strange idea a special kind of legitimacy.

2013 was also the year that AMD made a desperate bid for market share at the high end of the gaming GPU market with the R9–290X, aiming squarely at Nvidia’s GTX 780 and massively undercutting the price. Or, at least they tried to. [1]

Nvidia’s GTX 7xx series of Kepler GPUs managed to be the last of an era for Nvidia: An era when the compute performance of their consumer GPUs was (likely) artificially handicapped to protect their Quadro and Tesla product lines.

The result was a rush on AMD GPUs as people desperate to get on the cryptocurrency bandwagon scrambled to find their piece of the pie, California gold rush style.

The price of AMD GPUs soared as retailers marked the cards up significantly over MSRP, selling a product once targeted at PC Gaming enthusiasts to a new class of customer who was willing to reach into deeper pockets because this wasn’t entertainment, this was an investment.

It wasn’t just Bitcoin, which was already moving towards ASIC based mining, by January of 2014 we’d see the highest price on newcomer Litecoin that it’s traded at until, well, last year.

In Q4 2013 and Q1 2014, you could find overpriced graphics cards being sold in 3 and 4 packs with a powersupply and the cheapest CPUs you could find with retailers trying to cater to the would be miner.

Of course, it didn’t last. Gamers screamed and AMD watched their market share dwindle as gamers bought the only thing they could: Nvidia products. By the time AMD stepped in with retailers to get pricing under control, the bubble had largely passed, flooding the market with used GPUs as the early rush miners converted their GPU mining investment into an ASIC solution… or grew bored with the amount of math involved in trying to figure out if you were actually spending more on electricity than you were making with your mining rig.

This time, things are different

The bubble of 2013/2014 was forgotten relatively quickly as new GPUs launched and cryptocurrency stayed confined to ASICs. In 2014, Intel launched their X99 platform and with it, insanely expensive DDR4, Nvidia gave us the GTX 9xx series and AMD pulled back to lick their wounds of being too successful in the wrong way.

So what’s making 2017’s rekindling of a forgotten romance turn into 2018’s blazing passion? This time, the bubble didn’t pop. There are more players on the board and some of those players have introduced forms of cryptocurrency that are difficult to mine on ASIC based solutions.

You have to remember that part of the appeal of cryptocurrency mining is that it was an ‘everyman’s’ chance to make some money. A little consumer hardware, your home computer crunching away while you were at work or sleeping… People want that dream of striking it, well, maybe rich, but if not rich, making money for doing effectively nothing other than watch the mining rig do its thing and not letting it catch fire. On that dream, the market has delivered and the GPU is once again king of a new generation of cryptocurrencies.

This time, the OEMs want to play

In the bubble of 2013/2014, the biggest winners in PC hardware were retailers. It demonstrated, however, that people who see cryptocurrency as a gold rush will pay more than the traditional consumer of components for custom PCs. 2013/2014 showed us that the deep pockets are there… and 2017’s rise of cryptocurrencies gave OEMs time to develop some purpose built hardware, just for miners.

The insanity we find on the shelves

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If you told me back in 2014 that I’d be seeing system boards with 19 PCIe slots.. and not just 19 PCIe slots but 3 ATX connectors so you can connect three separate power supplies to a single board. I’d probably have called you crazy. In 2018… you can buy one for around $400, assuming you can find one on the shelves somewhere.

Of course, not everyone wants to have three power supplies plugged into their mining rack, so, EVGA has given us another dose of insanity in the form of an 80+ Platinum 2200 watt power supply. Of course, you’ll need a 220v outlet to plug the monster into.