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Do you think hardware manufacturers are pushing the standard price llimit up to another level as performance in technology progress?

Tech_Dreamer

Been noticing that the price of hardware is subtly increasing as time progress , if you're buying a decent high end rig , compared to previous years , the cost is kinda increasing as time progress, Do note that this being High to Extreme performance range , entry & mid have been somewhat affordable, but in their defense it might be harder as a company to do millions worth r & d , but still when the profit margin is really big when sales are good, do you think consumers are being overcharged a lot in a different perspective? Post your thought down below

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I've only noticed Nvidia doing this 

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1 minute ago, No said:

I've only noticed Nvidia doing this 

The highest end ATI gpu in 1999 was 300

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Just now, thekeemo said:

The highest end ATI gpu in 1999 was 300

well i wasn't even born :P 

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5 minutes ago, thekeemo said:

The highest end ATI gpu in 1999 was 300

Adjusting for inflation, that figure becomes $430 USD. Remember that GPUs in those days were dinky little shits that consisted of a small PCB, a chip, and a single cheapo fan attached to said chip. Now throw in all the extra manufacturing costs that modern GPUs have, plus marketing and R&D, while also considering the much larger market and the gap begins to narrow.

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2 minutes ago, Virtual01 said:

Adjusting for inflation, that figure becomes $430 USD. Remember that GPUs in those days were dinky little shits that consisted of a small PCB, a chip, and a single cheapo fan attached to said chip. Now throw in all the extra manufacturing costs that modern GPUs have, plus marketing and R&D, while also considering the much larger market and the gap begins to narrow.

I count marketing as useless and therfore ignore it completely but yes accounting for inflation is a thing.

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I remember buying a GeForce 7800 GTX in 2005 for $500. According to Measuring Worth, that is about $606 using CPI (in 2014, I don't think they have 2015 available). So the regular GTX 1080 for $600 sounds about in line with inflation.

 

I'd argue processors have gotten cheaper over time. I pulled up my build in 2005, I bought an AMD Athlon X2 3800+ for $375. The X2 lineup at the time if I recall, went up to 4800+ and for at least $500 (maybe $600?). So at the current rate of things for Intel's side, that's like buying a i5-6600 for the price of an i7.

 

RAM has gotten ridiculously cheap over time. It's $70 for 16GB now.

 

Storage is in the same boat. 1TB drives routinely go for $60 at the cheapest. SSDs are the "wild west" so to speak.

 

The only thing that hasn't really changed are PSUs and cases.

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sales comes down to the principal elements: supply and demand.

also influential is inflation of currency.

 

wanna rip into cost effects, look at distribution (the middleman) for 30-70% pricing increases.

 

in business you have a couple of two paths to follow.

direct sales and/or through distribution channels.

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Products are worth what people are willing to pay for. Not what they believe it should be.

 

If the latter was the case, someone sell me a GT3 RS 4.0 for $4.

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I think the industry is running out of ways to reduce its costs.  For example, for the past 20-30 years, the trend has been to move as much production to offshore centers.  To the point where almost no "consumer" electronics are actually made in the so-called "G-7" countries.  Another trend that has run its course is moving design offshore.  Again, something that's been extensively done (most of Intel's newest processors are designed in Haifa, Israel for example!). 

 

Yet another trend has been towards more integration.  Computers that once required hundreds of chips, are now being implemented as "System on Chip" where only one or two chips, often with mixed signal components, are used for the entire implementation.  This has brought costs down dramatically.

 

But with these trends coming to an end, computer part prices are likely to start inflating along with, and perhaps even faster than the general economic inflation. 

 

I know with Intel in particular -- they did a 'shock and awe' about 5 years ago in an effort to drive AMD out of business -- by releasing their Sandy Bridge CPU's at basically an unheard of low price point.  And it mostly worked.  Looking back, I paid $267 for my i7-2600 in Canadian funds (so ~$210 USD$).  An i7-6700 is what, $405 at NCIX now.  Quite an increase indeed.

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9 hours ago, Sky Daddy said:

RX 480 ~980 performance  for $200

We got ourselves the true 8800GT replacement!

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$1700 for a 6950X, yep I'd agree. AMD have some fairly high priced kit on the market but nothing to silly, Intel & Nvidia are both different stories. 

 

Intel have kept desktop processors at quad core since before the I series even existed and invented a new category of components in order to boost the price of high end products. HEDC didn't exist at all 5 years ago, the extreme editions were simply top line desktop CPUs. As soon as users started asking for more cores they released SKT2011 and HEDC CPUs with more cores and a higher price.

 

Now before you all start pointing out that QX6950 CPUs were $1000, yes I know that however the motherboards were identical to the rest of the Core 2 series. Intel only released SKT1366/2011 and X58/X79 (I'm actually not sure if X58 was the first HEDC platform or not?) to split the market and inflate the price of the higher end products, if they could do X edition CPUs without a new chipset in the past then they can damn well do it in the present instead of selling chipsets to equipment manufacturers which cost more meaning boards for said chipsets cost consumers more. What's so different about SKT2011 from a manufacturing POV that justifies the 25 to 40 percent difference in price? Z170 supports more features for a much cheaper cost. When I bought my Skylake the only reason I didn't go 2011 was because of the board cost, £250 minimum for a decent board is insane considering my top line Z170 only cost me £170.

 

With the 6950X Intel want to double dip, your already paying a premium for the board to buy into HEDC in the first place and they seriously think it's OK to charge that much for a top end CPU? Is it $500 for 2 more cores over the 6900? The only beneficiarie on that deal is Intel's bank account. 

 

Nvidia is a slightly different situation, Gx100 is AFAIK the most expensive chip for them to manufacture and they're not artificially inflating the market by enforcing a more expensive driving platform but I still struggle to believe it costs them anywhere near $1000 to manufacture each Titan card, and yeah I know they have R&D costs and retailer/shipping costs etc but still, I'm damn sure Nvidia are making a very healthy profit on Gx100 (and even Gx102) GPUs. 

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19 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Now before you all start pointing out that QX6950 CPUs were $1000, yes I know that however the motherboards were identical to the rest of the Core 2 series. Intel only released SKT1366/2011 and X58/X79 (I'm actually not sure if X58 was the first HEDC platform or not?) to split the market and inflate the price of the higher end products, if they could do X edition CPUs without a new chipset in the past then they can damn well do it in the present instead of selling chipsets to equipment manufacturers which cost more meaning boards for said chipsets cost consumers more. What's so different about SKT2011 from a manufacturing POV that justifies the 25 to 40 percent difference in price? Z170 supports more features for a much cheaper cost. When I bought my Skylake the only reason I didn't go 2011 was because of the board cost, £250 minimum for a decent board is insane considering my top line Z170 only cost me £170.

 

With the 6950X Intel want to double dip, your already paying a premium for the board to buy into HEDC in the first place and they seriously think it's OK to charge that much for a top end CPU? Is it $500 for 2 more cores over the 6900? The only beneficiarie on that deal is Intel's bank account.

On the flip side, I've see Z170 boards cost more than the rest of the system minus the GPU combined. And in some cases, may cost as much with the GPU. What do they throw on there? "Premium overclocking parts"?

 

However, the top end stuff is always stupid expensive for less gain, and everyone's guilty of it. Why did AMD release the Fury X2 for the cost of three of the GPUs that it doubled up on? Why is the Titan X $1000 when its closest performer was $750? Why did AMD sell a processor that was 400MHz faster for $200 more?

 

Because someone will buy it.

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The price per wafer is going up for silicon currently and that is in turn increasing the cost of components made with it. Moore's law is certainly broken in the past years, it is no longer true that in 18 months or so you can see 2x the transistors at the same price point, the price is not trending as well with shrinks as it used. We still have some amount of scaling with additional transistors but the cost is going up.

 

The GTX 1080 is just an example of that, its more expensive than the 980 on release and its also quite a bit smaller at 314mm^2 verses 394mm^2 of the 980. So even though its faster it ought to be about 20% cheaper to manufacturer than the 980 and hence be somewhat cheaper. However the current estimate is  its about 12% more expensive on TSMC 16nm than it was on 28nm per wafer so then its only an 8% increase in price given its area but its important to remember the yields at 314 are going to be quite a bit better than 394.

 

The other example is the RX 480 despite its low price its actually probably a price rise. Its a 214mm^2 die and its about the same as a 390 in terms of hardware on the chip but its also a much narrower bus . The 390 is 438mm^2 and was $329. Given all else being equal the RX 480 would be $160 (214 / 438 * 329), but its actually $199. Factor in that it has a much narrower bus (half the size) which saves considerable space and that GDDR5 is considerably cheaper today than it was when that card was released we are looking at a substantial price hike from AMD. Its 24% without factoring in either of those two things so about 12% just for AMD's pocket over and above the process cost increase. Considering the massive increase in yields AMD will be seeing by halving the die size they gouging you even more than Nvidia is!

 

Intel chips keep getting smaller with each generation and more expensive. For a very long time computing was getting cheaper, it isn't anymore and its not entirely process increases as far as I can tell.

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I would say yes.  In particular with intel and nvidia.  1080 die size is near half of a 980ti,  yet it costs as much money or more (even a slight price increase  per mm2 cant justify that) 

And intel is making a 1800$ consumer cpu (1700$ for bulk),  whereas extreme editions have historically been 1000$. 

But this might be so they dont hurt the xeon market,  as linus has pointed out. 

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27 minutes ago, Coaxialgamer said:

I would say yes.  In particular with intel and nvidia.  1080 die size is near half of a 980ti,  yet it costs as much money or more (even a slight price increase  per mm2 cant justify that) 

And intel is making a 1800$ consumer cpu (1700$ for bulk),  whereas extreme editions have historically been 1000$. 

But this might be so they dont hurt the xeon market,  as linus has pointed out. 

You can't necessarily go by die sizes, because, for example, the Radeon HD 7000 series were smaller than the HD 6000 series, but the HD 7000 series were more expensive. Transistor count would make more sense, but relative performance is where it counts.

 

Intel's probably doing the pricing to avoid cannibalizing the existing 6/8 core consumer parts. But hey, when you're the king, you can price it however you want right?

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16 hours ago, thekeemo said:

I count marketing as useless and therfore ignore it completely but yes accounting for inflation is a thing.

I clicked agree to your comment but I didn't mean to cuz I VERY much disagree. Lots of products have failed because of poor marketing. Bigger gaming channels on YouTube play games earlier then everyone else. This is because the developers of the game want to show the viewers what their game is like. I recently watched people play Dead Before Dawn and after watching them play it, I went and bought the game on Steam. That's Marketing.

What Linus Tech Tips does is part of companies marketing budget. They send him stuff for him to review. This gives the viewer an idea of what a product is. Marketing is very important. With out it, you wouldn't even know about so many things you've bought.

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16 hours ago, No said:

I've only noticed Nvidia doing this 

Here are the 6 latest high end single GPU cards from AMD and Nvidia, as well as how much they were at launch. I am not counting the Titan cards though since they aren't exactly consumer cards (I have included the prices though).

 

AMD:

4870 - 300 USD

5870 - 380 USD

6970 - 370 USD

7970 - 550 USD

290X - 550 USD

Fury X - 650 USD

 

Nvidia:

285 - 400 USD

480 - 500 USD

580 - 500 USD

680 - 500 USD

780 Ti - 700 USD   (Titan Black - 1000 USD)

980 Ti - 650   (Titan X - 1000 USD)

1080 - 700 USD

 

 

AMD has increased the price of their cards more than Nvidia has.

 

 

Inflation is not to blame either since the effect has been far bigger than inflation. The price of the highest end single GPU card has increased 117% for AMD and 75% for Nvidia. Inflation will only account for ~13% of that price increase.

 

Another area where we can see this is phones. The S7 costs way more than the S2 did at launch. Here in Sweden it's been about a 25% increase in price.

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10 minutes ago, TheCMan said:

I clicked agree to your comment but I didn't mean to cuz I VERY much disagree. Lots of products have failed because of poor marketing. Bigger gaming channels on YouTube play games earlier then everyone else. This is because the developers of the game want to show the viewers what their game is like. I recently watched people play Dead Before Dawn and after watching them play it, I went and bought the game on Steam. That's Marketing.

What Linus Tech Tips does is part of companies marketing budget. They send him stuff for him to review. This gives the viewer an idea of what a product is. Marketing is very important. With out it, you wouldn't even know about so many things you've bought.

Now what if nothing was marketed? The products people buy wouldn't be the best marketed. They would be the best made.

Thats that. If you need to get in touch chances are you can find someone that knows me that can get in touch.

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Inflation affects every sector, with some products it's more extreme than with others but as time proceeds the absolute cost of components will keep rising, relatively they should stay similar though.

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1 minute ago, Prysin said:

one word: Inflation

I know. The person I quoted said AMD prices didnt go up

Thats that. If you need to get in touch chances are you can find someone that knows me that can get in touch.

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