Yeah, I was thinking that 1,830€ was just a normal ridiculous price for a graphics card.

...I haven't shopped for graphics cards in about 6 years...

At that price you'd be stupid not to buy it.

I'd hazard that people buying those cards at that price aren't buying them for gaming, they're using them to run local AI models

970 gang still going strong here

I feel your pain, I'm using a 3060 rog strix 12gb card. It does everything that I want I to, but I'm biting my nails over how it'll cope with AAA titles over the next 12+ months, at 1440p settings.

You could tinker with microcontrollers. They're pretty capable when it comes to building smaller iot devices. Or pick up a used mini pc and start self hosting 😉

I already miss the good old days. Back when RAM was affordable.

Or support indie Devs not corporations.

You don’t need a 5090, 5080, or even an NVIDIA to run games with very detailed graphics.

This means AAA game developers will need to actually sit back and optimise their games, rather than keep producing badly written code and bloated graphics.

What’s going to be down is the consumer segment at NVIDIA, because it’s not making them the money they’d like it to. Last time I read, the consumer segment was far below 5% of their income.

No. You don't need tensor cores for graphics nor do you need nvidia. This is the work of scalpers and consumer tier inference combined with a nvidia monopoly used strategically to cash out while they can. Gpus should be abundant still if nvidia didn't do this fast exit from the field and entering ai. The only redeeming factor is that all of a sudden, most of them will be bagholders

FWIW, lots of power connectors are indeed only rated for a low number of mating cycles (only 30), not just 12VHPWR. This includes the old PCIe 8 pin (same 30 limit). Realistically you will probably not reach the rated limit.

The actual problem, I think, is that the connector could operate without being fully plugged in, especially without current balancing on the side of the card. This is an actual fire hazard, as you now get at least some connections with very high resistance, forcing extreme current on the remaining wires with low resistance connections. This is combined with the fact that the safety margin on 12VHPWR is a lot lower than that of the PCIe 8 pin (which I believe can safely carry a lot more than its 150W rating).

I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to unplug them at the end of each day!

It's because you actually believe the scalpers, the megacorps and the pundits. What if chips that can render graphics where abundant and these were all trying to make money? Because that's what they are and scarcity is good for all of them strategically. As usual it's not going to last forever, all scams have a half-life