Are they?
You can get one for very cheap price, but then such thing is not good for gaming...
They are very sophisticated pieces of technology, with lot of memory and very complex computer chips. Also research isn't cheap either... New tech is always expensive...
Comment has been collapsed.
Gold is the best available conductor of electricity. (AFAIK) It is better than silver or copper. So, yes, a video card with gold components is worth what you are paying for if you are just thinking of the materials cost.
Obviously, the next step is to consider the brand and make of the card. But usually, us gamers look at that first instead of if the card has gold components.
Comment has been collapsed.
What Ekaros said. Copper is very nearly 50% better at conducting than gold, and silver is the most conductive metal that I know of. But gold is useful for electrical contacts because it is extremely non-reactive to air (which corrodes most metals).
Comment has been collapsed.
Also consider how complex the current GPUs are, they have billions of transistors and each of them is very very very small... The investment in technology to make these and designs these is large.
Whole process isn't exactly simple. There really is quite many factors included.
Comment has been collapsed.
the reason is market forces. people buy them that high, there aren't alot of manufacturers, and so sellers met buyers high(also it costs a bit to make(develop more than manufacture I mean) them else you'd see more companies doing it)
it isn't the gold. they use such a tiny amount its not even cost effective recycling it
Comment has been collapsed.
I just checked something. The 30€ GPU (Geforce 210) I bought has 260M transistors. On other hand the 400€ GPU (GTX 770) has 3540M transistors. On other hand the chip sizes are 57mm^2 for 210 and 294 mm^2 for the 770.
They are made with different precisions, but lower precision is cheaper. Still, the size of chip is valid comparison as you can get more of the smaller chips for same price as larger ones. This ratio in this case might very well be 5 to 1. On other hand the higher end cards also have more of memory and more expensive memory. For my cards the difference is between 512MB and 4GB, that is 8 times more memory. Higher end cards also need better on board power supply as they use more power. These factors alone make large difference.
Mark up is also large factor, but it's the cost we have to pay for latest tech.
Comment has been collapsed.
Attempting to recoup the [very high] cost of research and skimming money off early adopters are the big drivers behind the cost of a top spec graphics card in comparison to a middle-of-the-road one.
In terms of components and manufacturing cost, there really isn't much difference...
Comment has been collapsed.
That's pretty much it, and the same for all technology. You pay for the research and development cost for high end models.
Comment has been collapsed.
1,097 Comments - Last post 14 minutes ago by Paperface
47,288 Comments - Last post 23 minutes ago by Sh4dowKill
165 Comments - Last post 28 minutes ago by JTC3
109 Comments - Last post 1 hour ago by maximilyn
211 Comments - Last post 1 hour ago by Koalala
407 Comments - Last post 2 hours ago by Vodeni
200 Comments - Last post 2 hours ago by Vodeni
40 Comments - Last post 25 seconds ago by hbouma
25 Comments - Last post 1 minute ago by Sco12345678
218 Comments - Last post 5 minutes ago by gameboy9725
14 Comments - Last post 8 minutes ago by Fluffster
2,672 Comments - Last post 8 minutes ago by Dyna18
30 Comments - Last post 13 minutes ago by adam1224
420 Comments - Last post 15 minutes ago by Tucs
I can't be the only one who thinks graphic cards are completely over priced, is there a good reason why are they over priced?
Comment has been collapsed.