On the bright side, soon enough people will start dropping it because it won't be profitable very much longer. (I'll just stick with my laptop death orgy mining Gridcoin)

My brother's GTX 780 died yesterday, so he's looking at getting an ASUS STRIX GTX 1080.  I suggested a couple EVGA cards in the same price range that are about 1.2" shorter.  (His current card interferes with his HDD bays.)

For now, he's playing on his 4770K's iGPU, and says it's "terrible - 28fps 800x600 low in ARK:SE".  I'm considering maybe letting him borrow my EVGA 1060 SC 3GB temporarily until he gets a new card.  (I'm not gaming much on my desktop for now, & if I need to game, my laptop has a 970M & 6700K.)

Yikes. That sucks ass. Sorry about that

I hope those prices go back to normal ASAP. (Doesn't matter for me as much as I use low end or old hardware, but still. Sucks to be in that position)

I personally think prices were too high even before the mining craze.  Look at the price the GTX 285 launched at - that's what I think an x80-class card SHOULD be.  ($359).  $500-1000 should be reserved for workstation/server cards.  (Same with CPUs - MicroCenter's Black Friday price on an i7-xxxxK is what the regular price on a top HEDT CPU should be, IMO, with $1K reserved for the Xeon E7-8xxx flagships.  But I don't think we'll ever see that, even if AMD goes crazy low with their pricing & prices their CPUs at 25-33% above cost.)