Why are PCs suddenly so expensive, Guru?

AEyeing up a new desktop machine and feeling like someone’s kicked your wallet square in the coin purse? You and GaGu both. We who wish to get our jollies from gaming are being pushed out of the market by those who instead want to jam consumer hardware into their garages and generate a lot of heat (and waste a lot of electricity) mining minute amounts of doomed cryptocurrency on the best graphics cards they can get their hands on. Retailers, facing shortages and a virtual run on the GPU bank, have responded by hiking up prices and hailing capitalism by flogging as many cards as they can at inflated rates.

But don’t worry, reader, because good old Nvidia has a solution! Hooray! The plan is thus: retailers have been asked very nicely to restrict the number of cards they sell in a single transaction in order to save some for gamers. And that’s about it. Which, frankly, is just about the most stupid solution ever, given that Guru presumes not many retailers see this as a problem at all: they’re selling cards, however misguided the buyers might be, at twice the retail price. The things are flying out the door. Why comply?

This won’t last forever, certainly if someone can either ramp up production of GPU s or the much-better-for-mining ASI C devices that are designed to sniff out magical pseudomoney and nothing else. Sadly, the former isn’t too feasible, particularly as the crypto market is so volatile – overstock of graphics cards could be even more damaging to the market – and ASI C miners are a rare commodity indeed. At least, and this is small consolation, the fickle coinmunity likes to upgrade their rigs every five minutes. Keep an eye out for second-hand bargains on slightly toasted components.