my conspiracy theory on the card shortage: profits are high and the miners who started in March, April, May of 2017, just ROI'd their gear, and with the coin prices high, are potentially doubling down on more gear.
Everything I bought that far back ROIed months ago.
I'd go with the "prices JUMPED 2-3x in late December and it took time for miners to decide the prices were going to hang around long enough to be WORTH building more rigs for" theory.
The mining theory though doesn't account for the shortage and pricing on the 1080 and 1080 ti - SOME of the pricing on those is probably "ram price jump" but the SHORTAGE of cards I don't think can be blamed on memory pricing.
1070 ti is a special case - card didn't exist during the previous runup, but between me and Voskcoin and others picking up the theme it's gotten quite popular for EFFICIENT mining.
Newegg got some of the MSI Blower model 1070 ti cards in - limit 1 though - at a SANE price.
Mine is on order - I wanted to try some of the other "single-8pin" cards anyway, though I'd have prefered the ASUS blower card as my next "try it out" card - as I'm still not 100% sure the MSI uses a ball-bearing blower.
Their OTHER cards are ball bearing though, so I'm willing to risk it ONCE.
Transaction went through without issue - I'm inclined to think my issue with the previous transaction was due to the "holiday Bitcoin backlog" + crazy-high transaction fee caused some sort of issue.
Newegg also had ONE Sapphire Nitro design (570 I think) in stock at under $300 - didn't notice the limit though offhand - and one other RX card around $300, Powercolor IIRC.
Rest were ALL $389 and up.
At the time AMD and Nvidia made their forecast, they made sense - coin prices had been flat for months, demand was dropping down to near "pre-surge" levels.
Then their forecasts got borked by ANOTHER unexpected price jump....
I was doing some wide reading today, trying to figure Volta - and as of right now I'm starting to think the first "consumer" Volta GPU(s) might get announced in late March at that Nvidia "confrence" they have annually - been a few years since they introduced a new line at that, but the timeing seems to fit a LOT of other indicators.
I wouldn't bet on immediate availability though - probably depends on how fast Samsung, Micron, and "whoever else" gets GDDR 6 production ramped up.
I DO expect the "consumer" cards to be GDDR 6 not HDM2 though.