What's with AMD graphics card availability and pricing?

[Simon]

I got an RX 5500 XT about a year ago. I since experimented with my R9 285 as a second card and got a little hooked on having two cards but took it out as it's not very efficient compared to the new processors. I have since looked for another 5500 or 5600 as an upgrade to make my current card the secondary. But prices seem to be going up rather than down for second hand cards that now sell for more than the new cards that have not been in stock for months.

The new 6000 series has launched, I think as again no stock and the 5000 series is still priced highly considering you can't get any. If I can believe the shambles that the AMD site has become and some sort of online store thing they have a maybe not yet released 6000 card with 4000 stream processors is just £550 when a 5500 with 1400 is still £200 and the 5600 with 2300 stream processors is £3-400!, what?

Do AMD cards actually exist?

[tszaboo]

As I hear, they sent like a few hundred cards to Europe from the newest RX 6700 or whatever it is called.
You cannot buy them, dont even try. Also, you cannot buy nvidia with sane pricing.
The best way of getting a computer seems to be prebuilt systems.
Also, you dont need 2 cards.

[David Hess]

I bought the parts for my new Zen 2 workstation about 6 months ago and payed $220 for an uprated RX570.  Even then, high end GPU cards were in short supply and prices were elevated.

Since that time, apparently people in need of a GPU have worked their way down the performance and generation ladders so my card is going for 4 to 5 times the price with everything newer being out of stock.

[Simon]

As I hear, they sent like a few hundred cards to Europe from the newest RX 6700 or whatever it is called.
You cannot buy them, dont even try. Also, you cannot buy nvidia with sane pricing.
The best way of getting a computer seems to be prebuilt systems.
Also, you dont need 2 cards.

I know I don't need two cards. I run folding at home and the cards get hot. The 5500 officially uses up to 120W, I have only ever seen 100W on mine and it usually runs at 90W, I can limit the consumption to 60W but only a 20% speed reduction and a much quieter card so 2 cards will still be the same power as one card with 180% the speed of one card. I have used up to 3 4k monitors and although the 5500 will cope fine spreading the load would be nice and the 4 GB of VRAM looks well used. A 5600 is practically twice the cores so that would make my current 5500 a second card or at the current prices, whoa maybe sell it.

I thought all the people that needed word processing grade PC's and mainly laptops to work from home on were now happy, I've never known a market so constrained that last years out of date tech is so sought after that not only is it out of production and second hand ones cost more than new when it acme out but the price per performance is more than the latest just out.

[filssavi]

It is not AMD it is PC parts in general, GPUs and Power supplies in particular.

AMD and NVidia are shipping record numbers but demand is just too high (I heard  it has been season level for many months straight).

There are several factors that conspire to make it so:

1) With lockdowns people need 2/3 reasonably decent PC per household to do remote work and learning, and they want to also game on it (you might as well)
2) there is a bit of a ethereum mining boom right now so mining farms are buying As many gpus as they can lay their hands on
3) Scalpers use bots to buy cards on first party shops and dump them on eBay for massive markups
4) global semiconductor shortages indirectly due to last year lockdowns

[Simon]

Oh well I guess I will just have to wait to increase my contribution to science . I'm going to have fun at work then or at least the IT guy will. The cards they have don't work well with KiCAD and yesterday it came down to "OK what card do you use at home? let's just get you one of those". I suppose I could offer them my R9 285 and let them pay the electric bill to run it. It's not too bad for a card that is so old, it runs folding at home at half the speed and uses around the same power as the 5500.