Huge flood in China could put an end to falling graphics card prices

By Darren Allan

Serious flooding in the Chinese province of Sichuan has disrupted cryptocurrency mining operations located there, which could potentially have something of a knock-on effect in terms of increased demand for graphics cards, to replace boards which have been damaged.

This could be bad news for the average consumer in terms of GPU pricing, but to explain why, we need to take a couple of steps back, and look at the overall picture.

Essentially, this is another unpredictable variable that is being thrown into the currently complex equation of supply and demand in the graphics card market. Right now, there’s reportedly a big surplus of GPU stock, certainly in Nvidia’s case, as the firm apparently overestimated demand from cryptocurrency miners (and allegedly has something like a million current-gen graphics cards waiting to be released).

Now, this excess has to be shifted before the next-gen cards can come out – otherwise they will be forever gathering dust on the shelves – and as we reported earlier this week, this has led to speculation that GPU prices could drop by around 20% over the course of July, to get that stock sold. Great news for consumers, right?

Well, that’s where this flood could seriously muddy …read more

Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components