it's china joy sorry
what is china joy well apparently it's a big enough event
for AMD to announce their latest GPU there so
yep another graphics card no one can afford thanks to scalpers and miners or
is it yes it is but AMD's Radeon rx 6600 xt
announcement also gives us an excuse to talk about why pricing for these parts
is still so outrageous and some of the big changes that could
finally put an end to the GPU shortage in the coming months
it also gives us an excuse to tell you about our sponsor seasonic
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AMD's new Radeon rx 6600 xt is looking
like a pretty standard launch so far you got 32 compute units 8 gigs of gddr6
memory and 32 megabytes of infinity cache clock speeds are reasonably high
and we already know that rd and a2 is a ridiculously scalable architecture
thanks to earlier looks at their mobile parts they'll be available starting
august 11th from third parties only no
AMD branded card this time around although AMD says that there is a
reference design that will likely make up the bulk of the early shipments the
reference design calls for only a single 8-pin pci express power connector with a
total board power of 160 watts that's not too shabby for what AMD is touting
as a 1080p monster that beats out the rtx 3060 and pulls over double the gtx
1060s performance and it's efficient enough to be cec compliant unlike
certain gaming pcs from our friends at dell
got em make sure you get subscribed by the way we have a whole video coming about that
debacle the only problem with this announcement is that if you hated the
rtx 3060s msrp of 329 us dollars the rx
6600 xt's 379 dollar price tag is going
to be even more painful it is roughly as
fast as its price difference suggests if AMD's benchmarks are to be believed
however so it could still end up being a great value at least by today's
standards it's an open secret that GPU prices have been steadily rising over
the past few generations i mean heck the gtx 1080 launched at 5.99 and the 1080
ti a GPU that held its status as a top
tier gaming card for over three years cost just 6.99 ah memories but
unfortunately memories may be all there is left to that kind of pricing at least
for the foreseeable future and trust me i hate it too
but that's just the way it is as for why
it's the way it is there's a litany of reasons but a few key factors stand out
starting with of course the corporate greed angle that's been thrown around
ever since the launch of NVIDIA's rtx 20 series
the thing is believe it or not both NVIDIA and AMD for that matter love
their shareholders much more than they will ever love you or me but it's also
not the only reason there are some very real logistical problems that are
steadily pushing pricing up as companies try to remain profitable though to be
clear the companies i'm referring to there are not NVIDIA or AMD neither of
which are struggling to remain profitable in fact compared to a year
ago both of them reported nearly double
the gaming revenue in the most recent quarter with healthy gross margins of
anywhere from 50 to 65 so the business of designing gpus
partnering with a chip foundry like tsmc or samsung and selling the chips to
board partners is as healthy as ever it's the board partners folks like evga
ASUS or MSI who are feeling the squeeze
and passing that squeeze along to you take memory for example
dram supply has been seriously hampered by the silicon shortage with contract
pricing going up by 5 to 10 in the first quarter of this year then a
staggering 20 to 25 in the second quarter with a projected
eight to 13 percent more again coming in the third quarter that is over a 50
cumulative increase in the price since the end of 2020 and spa prices have been
consistently worse with current prices sitting at easily double the contract
price and trend for saying that at the scalp apocalypse's peak spot prices were
up as much as 200 percent higher than contract pricing which is
wow so that is why NVIDIA can the
rumored high memory rtx 30 series eh at least for now
and this isn't likely to let up demand from game consoles and gpus remains high
and the realities of wafer production mean that eight gigabit and 16 gigabit
gddr6 chips need separate allocations
so this crucial manufacturing capacity is split
the consoles use 16 gigabit chips while consumer gpus currently use eight
gigabit chips and the majority of eight gigabit capacity is reportedly feeding
NVIDIA's lower end 30 series gpus which leaves
very little on the bone for anyone else thankfully the 6600xt is going to be
using 16 gigabit chips so for this launch anyway it's less of a concern
the final dram factor though is somewhat unexpected and it's servers
that's right this whole thing is colliding with a big boom in server
orders and servers they need dram lots
and lots of dram and all of that is just the memory next
up we've got copper you know that stuff that good heat sinks are made of among
other things well copper's gone from a little under two dollars twenty cents
per pound in mid 2020 to double that as
of today and a lot of that has to do with speculation that a global economic
rebound will boost demand for metals used in manufacturing and in
construction if that sounds like it'll impact a lot more than copper
you're right aluminum prices are skyrocketing they're up about 45 since
this time last year steel and nickel are up nearly 30 percent plastics are up 47
and neodymium which is used for magnets in fans and headphones is up a
staggering 88 even tin and lead which
make up solder are up nearly 36 and 14
respectively so all of that means that virtually every material that goes into
producing a GPU or really any consumer electronics is significantly more
expensive than it was just a year ago with the sole exception being gold
and the fun keeps coming if you're a us resident and the GPU that you want is
made in china tariffs are famously misrepresented by
politicians and enthusiasts alike but the tldr is u.s consumers get to pay the
u.s government between 10 to 25 more for
electronics manufactured in china right now which as of the end of 2020 has gpus
falling in that 25 bracket
there's no tariffs on merch from lttstore.com though so buy a t-shirt
like this one and you'll be amazed how many fellow tech fans approach you to
talk shop it's actually kind of great the final head of the GPU pricing hydra
is of course the silicon shortage itself now we can see from AMD and NVIDIA's
financial reporting that they've been telling the truth all along
sort of like clearly they are producing plenty
of gpus but even if we account for NVIDIA taking on average 10 more profit
margin than they did in 2015 both of them are experiencing clearly
unprecedented levels of demand and when demand goes up
pricing goes up this shortage is affecting industries
everywhere from electronics all the way to automobiles and recent reports show
that even apple who to date has seemed relatively insulated thanks to their
careful production forecasting is starting to feel the crunch
AMD's dr lisa said during an interview with behrens that supply is expected to
remain quite tight until 2022 and while
AMD may be making inroads on supply the silicon shortage as a whole is likely to
continue well into next year thanks to the disruptions that covet has caused in
labor logistics and materials
thankfully taiwan's worst drought on record did let up in late june which
should take some of the pressure off of tsmc who happens to be the world's
largest chip foundry in other good news for consumers looking to buy a GPU one
of the major factors influencing demand for these processors mining has begun to
wane in recent weeks following crackdowns on crypto mining by the
chinese government since crypto's pricing began to fall in
early may gpus have at least begun to experience a slow return to normal as
miners have begun fire sailing gpus in
the chinese market although pent-up demand from gamers means that prices are
likely to remain high for the foreseeable future that is until we get
a mainstream GPU that is shipping in serious enough volume to put enough
cards in gamers hands that it puts pricing pressure on the more premium
ones get subscribed then by the way so you don't miss our review of the rx 6600 xt
when it launches it's based on AMD's navi 23 die which should mean better
yields per wafer helping to chip away
pun intended at the supply constraints that is assuming it ends up being a
solid card now at this point in the video you might have noticed that i
didn't ever offer an opinion on the state of the gaming GPU market that's
because in my opinion it doesn't matter what i think
that's the hottest take you're going to get for me today the unfortunate facts
are that there is little that can be done about GPU pricing right now but the
good news is that once economic recovery efforts are in full swing demand for raw
materials should begin to fall off and with any luck we'll be able to live in a
world where the fun comes back into pc building
you could try to accelerate the end of the ride by keeping your money in your
pocket when the 6600 xt briefly hits store shelves
but truthfully it probably won't change anything just like i never changed the
segways to my sponsors not even to build redux thanks redux for
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today while you're down there maybe check out our recent video on NVIDIA actually
discontinuing support for their kepler gpus and whether you really need to
upgrade it's kind of a strange sentence to say
about a GPU that first launched nine years ago
man another nine years that's you go back nine more years
that's GeForce four isn't that crazy