The State of the DIY PC Gaming Market

The PC gaming market in recent times has been fluctuating a lot. The entire industry has been hit with a wave of demand rising prices to unbelievable heights. In this article, I want to talk about what gamers and PC enthusiasts should do at the moment.

What is happening?

Right now prices have been rising at an alarming rate. Even the cheapest parts are being swept away from shelves or had their prices inflated. Building a PC right now would likely cost nearly double than what it took in Early 2017. Things like RAM, CPUs, and Graphics Cards have started to become harder to find. I have seen Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti's for over $500 more than their original asking price.

Why it is happening?

In recent years cryptocurrency entered the market becoming widely popular very quickly with titans like Bitcoin and Ethereum ruling the market. Many people like to "mine" the latter of the two using a thing called GPU Mining. Essentially it is a number-crunching system where people "mine" the coins and receive a payment for it. The miners actually hold transactions between two users and get a portion of a fee.
With the rise in the value of these coins, more and more miners are joining in to make some cash. In order to mine, you must have multiple GPUs which will handle all the workload, so people are buying them up as quickly as they can.

What can we do?

Unfortunately, there is nothing that we can do to stop the miners. they are still customers just like us that pay money for the products. We just have to wait it out and hope that we can survive. Save your money and wait till the prices drop.

Sources
https://priceorigin.com/2018/01/02/best-high-ram-prices-threaten-to-strangle-pc-gaming-market/
https://camelcamelcamel.com/GeForce-Gaming-DisplayPort-Graphics-TURBO-GTX1080TI-11G/product/B06Y31FYWY