Why is my video card so expensive now?

[Seahawks Guy]

I bought my card almost a year ago and it was $300. Now the cheapest I can find it is $350......

Unless there is a difference between these 2 cards?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814131540

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814131478

I wanna go SLI mode but I was expecting my card to be more affordable especially since I saw it on sale for $200 just a few months ago....

 

[RolandDeschain]

The rise to prominence of SLI and Crossfire means video cards retain value a lot easier and longer, and if the manufacturers don't make enough of them to the point where there are still a ton available a year later...You see the result. Those are the same exact card. The good news, however, is that you can use any 7950 with the same clock speeds (or even just make sure the clock speeds match) and use Crossfire with it.

 

[Seahawks Guy]

Damn that's the cheapest one too. Can't find any on ebay for less than $300 either.

 

[Joey13091]

Just get this one.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814121724

 

[Seahawks Guy]

Just get this one.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814121724

Nice...I'll probably be spending that much on my next video card for my next build...I think I'm just gonna start pocketing the money now.

 

[253hawk]

I would suspect 7950's are hard to find and still pricey because of their efficiency for mining bitcoin currency.

 

[AgentDib]

253 nailed it, you happened to buy a card that is very popular for mining. It's easy to overclock a 7950 and the compute performance is good for the power draw.

Newer video cards are better for gaming but ATI recent offerings have high power consumption to performance ratios and Nvidia has limited compute performance on their cards so as not to compete with their Titan.

AMD's architecture is proficient with the scrypt algorithm, which is memory bandwidth-intensive. And so miners are loading up on the cards able to give them the highest hash rates per watt. Unfortunately, AMD says there is nothing it can do to control the elevated prices on its cards; vendors are the ones jacking up the prices.

 

[Seahawks Guy]

A friend of mine just offered to sell me both of his Geforce 680 GTX's to go SLI for $400....FOR BOTH. I can probably sell my card for close to $300....so it looks like I lucked out!!!