The GTX 1650 is now the best-selling card on Amazon and Newegg

midian182

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Staff member
In brief: If anything illustrates just how bad today’s graphics card market is, it’s this: the best-selling GPU on both Amazon and Newegg isn’t one of the RTX 3000 or Radeon RX 6000 series. It’s not even from the RTX 2000 line. It’s the two-year-old, underwhelming GTX 1650.

We’re all familiar with the problems that come with trying to buy a graphics card today. The main culprit is the chip shortage, which many in the industry, including Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, believe will not alleviate until 2023. The obscene prices and general lack of availability are exacerbated by scalpers looking to make a quick profit and miners taking advantage of cryptos’ high price.

The result of all this mess is that many people, especially those building PCs from scratch, simply can’t afford to add a modern GPU. Tom’s Hardware reports that the situation has led to the Turing-era GTX 1650 becoming the best-selling card on both Amazon and Newegg.

The news won’t surprise those paying attention to the Steam Hardware & Software Survey. The GTX 1650 is the second-most-popular card among participants and saw the fifth-highest (0.16%) gains last month.

That’s not to say that the GTX 1650 is selling anywhere near its original $150 MSRP. Newegg’s number one—the MSI Ventus—is $355, while Amazon’s Zotac Gaming GTX 1650 is $324. Strangely, MSI’s GDDR5 card is more expensive than Zotac’s GDDR6-sporting model.

Tom’s notes that in addition to being one of the cheapest cards available that can squeeze out around 60fps@1080p on many modern(ish) games, the card’s four different versions made with three different dies and two different memory modules are also helping its cause, allowing Nvidia to produce it in large quantities and recycle defective TU116 and TU106 dies to be used in the GTX 1650.

We awarded the GTX 1650 a score of 60 in our 2019 review, noting that it wasn’t a bad product at its $150 MSRP—still, desperate times and all that.

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Doesn't hurt that you really don't need anything beyond it to basically play anything you'd ever want. Yes you might need to put down some settings to low on the newest games, beats having to put down the money you need for rent or food.

You just know both AMD and Nvidia could have released the 6500 and the 3050 for desktops months ago, they just don't because they will always much rather sell you the unnecessarily powerful cards first. It's also why for example Nvidia is so obsessed with Ray Tracing: it tanks performance so badly power GPUs become relevant again because otherwise well, you could just keep using the 1050 or 1650 until the 3050 comes out if it does at all, it's only when you want the fancy reflections you won't pay atention to in game anyway that you'd want to put down more than 150 bucks (300 now due to scarcity) for a GPU.
 
It sucks that better GPUs are too expensive but this has been said by everyone at least a million times and it's getting annoying reading the same crybaby posts and articles every other day.

Depending on the games you play, this isn't so bad. This is a 1080p medium settings card and if you avoid dog-**** games you just avoided 99% of demanding titles released in the last couple of years.
 
It sucks that better GPUs are too expensive but this has been said by everyone at least a million times and it's getting annoying reading the same crybaby posts and articles every other day.

Depending on the games you play, this isn't so bad. This is a 1080p medium settings card and if you avoid dog-**** games you just avoided 99% of demanding titles released in the last couple of years.
That doesnt make this card worth $350. Not even close.
 
It sucks that better GPUs are too expensive but this has been said by everyone at least a million times and it's getting annoying reading the same crybaby posts and articles every other day.

While I agree with the second part of the post, saying the articles are "annoying" and "crybaby posts" implies that you think that either they're ineffective or that they're annoying because AMD and Nvidia can't do anything about the situation: Whichever it is, it's wrong: Keeping everyone keenly and constantly aware of the scarcity puts pressure on all vendors and people to stop trying to pretend things are ok and keep releasing new products that are not obtainable at all, which we know it's something they're about to do do again, probably soon.

Also it's been said constantly already but apparently it needs to be repeated: AMD and Nvidia as the core manufacturers absolutely *can* control the situation because they *can* control who are their distributors or even sell direct to customers (Or greatly expand their direct sales channel that's already in place in the case of Nvidia for example) Sure it takes money but it doesn't means they need to avoid selling *any* allocation to miners and scalpers (And to distributors they know will sell to them direct) but pretending nobody can do anything about it is just abdicating responsibility: Feign ignorance about the blatantly obvious large scale bulk sells that distributors are pushing right now and just say "We can't control them!" when you basically control 100% of the supply of GPU chips and can cut as much as well, 100% of miner sales overnight if you wanted to: A quick example is MSI: After we found out an MSI employee was scalping their own products there shouldn't have been a single new GPU allocated to them by any of their vendors, I don't care how much money they bring in there's always going to be someone else willing to take on that allocation.

What you call "annoying crybaby articles" I actually call consumer advocacy and well, journalism. If anything the articles are not frequent and not going far enough: They should be demanding AMD and Nvidia daily for comments, going undercover as bulk purchasers to publicly denounce distributors and AIB partners that sell directly to miners or known bot scalpers just to make sure none of them do any business ever again if Eth crashes.
 
Nvidia and AMD are raping gamers. As was said above. They could direct sell to gamers but they are squeezing every last penny out of people through their AIB distribution system and backroom dealing. I will never pay the current prices for their cards. I have a 1071ti I picked up for $300 a while back before prices skyrocketed. It does everything I need with my 5600x @1440. I have no need to upgrade for a long time. They are slowly killing off the DIY market and leaving people with a bitter taste in their mouth.
 
Nvidia stock price in end of Dec 2019 - around $60
Nvidia current stock price - around $300 peaking at around $330 last month

AMD stock price in end of Dec 2019 - around $45
AMD current stock price - around $150

For Nvidia and AMD there is no problem and for their customers there is no problem. For gamers there is a major problem but currently gamers don't impact Nvidia & AMD stock prices so they don't impact their customers. Once the stock price takes a hit and their customers start to complain, both companies will announce how they are bending over backwards to get video cards in to the hands of gamers.

FYI, if you think people who buy video cards are the "customers" you need a reality check.
 
They should be demanding AMD and Nvidia daily for comments, going undercover as bulk purchasers to publicly denounce distributors and AIB partners that sell directly to miners or known bot scalpers just to make sure none of them do any business ever again if Eth crashes.
They would simply respond with "they have a fiduciary responsibility to look out for the shareholders best interest." Currently that best interest is screwing over gamers and selling bulk quantities to miners which is what the shareholders want them to do. After all, they can always come back to the gamers if mining tanks and 99.9 percent of gamers will hand over their money to them for a nice new shiny video card. It's not like gamers have anyone else to turn to for a video card, it's AMD or Nvidia...or Intel integrated graphics.
 
They would simply respond with "they have a fiduciary responsibility to look out for the shareholders best interest." Currently that best interest is screwing over gamers and selling bulk quantities to miners which is what the shareholders want them to do. After all, they can always come back to the gamers if mining tanks and 99.9 percent of gamers will hand over their money to them for a nice new shiny video card. It's not like gamers have anyone else to turn to for a video card, it's AMD or Nvidia...or Intel integrated graphics.

This is 100% accurate, but that doesn't means we should not be repeating it, constantly, to make everybody aware of how things work because if there's even a small chance at least a few readers and posters will start to get it: there is no wining against a corporation and it isn't exclusive to just gpus sooner or later, it will happen with pretty damn crucial things like food, water and medicine under the same principles going to waste doing nothing in service of capital and private property.

Hell is already happening with vaccines and the severely undervaccinated poor countries.
 
"one of the cheapest cards available that can squeeze out around 60fps@1080p on many modern(ish) games"
A great many cards from previous generations can do the same thing. This is not a card that anyone needs as an upgrade. My old R9 Fury can do 60fps at 1080p on many modern(ish) games and it came out 6½ years ago! I was getting a solid 60fps in Godfall on my R9 Fury and all I had to do was turn the shadows down.

This proves how insane people are as it seems that the only thing needed to be a best-selling card today is real and provable existence.

"If you build it, they'll be dumb!"
 
Solid gpu. It's what I have in my Acer laptop I got for 599. Played so many games on it and I must say it's got more power than I was expecting when I got it. Can play most games I've tried on medium or high at 1080p. Played everything from Resident Evil Village to Doom Eternal and found it to be very cappable.
 
Doesn't hurt that you really don't need anything beyond it to basically play anything you'd ever want. Yes you might need to put down some settings to low on the newest games, beats having to put down the money you need for rent or food.
What makes me laugh is that it's not demonstrably faster than some cards that are three generations older but people are paying the money to "upgrade", not realising that the performance will remain at about the same level as what they were already getting.
You just know both AMD and Nvidia could have released the 6500 and the 3050 for desktops months ago, they just don't because they will always much rather sell you the unnecessarily powerful cards first.
You're right about that. The thing is, in this case, it makes no sense because they don't even have any of those cards either.
It's also why for example Nvidia is so obsessed with Ray Tracing: it tanks performance so badly power GPUs become relevant again because otherwise well, you could just keep using the 1050 or 1650 until the 3050 comes out if it does at all, it's only when you want the fancy reflections you won't pay atention to in game anyway that you'd want to put down more than 150 bucks (300 now due to scarcity) for a GPU.
I couldn't agree more. I never understood the obsession that nVidia has with ray-tracing and I saw it for what it was, a gimmick at worst and a fancy frill at best. This GTX 1650 is similar in potency to the RX 580 and GTX 1060 cards. It makes me wonder what exactly people had before if the GTX 1650 is considered an upgrade. My old R9 Fury was released 6½ years ago and just annihilates the GTX 1650. Sure it uses more juice but who cares as long as the performance is there? One can play the games and one can't, it's as simple as that. People are upgrading TO a card that's blown out of the water by the card that I upgraded FROM! They're also paying MORE for the GTX 1650 than I paid for either of my R9 Furies! I swear, I can hear the theme from The Twilight Zone playing in my head!
Also it's been said constantly already but apparently it needs to be repeated: AMD and Nvidia as the core manufacturers absolutely *can* control the situation because they *can* control who are their distributors or even sell direct to customers (Or greatly expand their direct sales channel that's already in place in the case of Nvidia for example) Sure it takes money but it doesn't means they need to avoid selling *any* allocation to miners and scalpers (And to distributors they know will sell to them direct) but pretending nobody can do anything about it is just abdicating responsibility.
Absolutely. In a situation like this, their actions have made zero sense because no matter what, they're going to sell them as fast as they can make them. On the one hand, you could keep a certain level of stock for gaming customers (limit one per customer) which would keep gamers happy and augment your brand's image in the consumer market (something that AMD USED to understand) while selling off the surplus to the miners. This kind of thing really hit AMD hard with the RX 470-580 because they let the miners buy them all up and nVidia was laughing all the way to the bank as the GTX 1060 became the card that everyone was buying. As a result, nVidia increased their already-extant lead in market presence and mindshare by a factor of at least three.

Now, to be fair to AMD, they were, at the time, absolutely desperate for money because they needed every dollar to bring Zen to market and their strategy was successful on the CPU side of things. ATi was their cash-cow for a long time because they weren't making all that much selling FX CPUs.
Feign ignorance about the blatantly obvious large scale bulk sells that distributors are pushing right now and just say "We can't control them!" when you basically control 100% of the supply of GPU chips and can cut as much as well, 100% of miner sales overnight if you wanted to: A quick example is MSI: After we found out an MSI employee was scalping their own products there shouldn't have been a single new GPU allocated to them by any of their vendors, I don't care how much money they bring in there's always going to be someone else willing to take on that allocation.
Yup. MSi has been a sleazy corporation for many years. The only motherboard that I've ever had fail on my while I was using it was, at the time, one of their FLAGSHIP models, the K9A2 Platinum:
msi_k9a2_platimum.jpg

This beauty was dead in less than 1½ years but since it only had a 1-year warranty, MSi would do NOTHING for me. I don't know about you, but if I'm a motherboard manufacturer and one of my flagship models dies that quickly, I'm embarrassed as hell and do what I can to preserve the perception of my brand lest I end up like BioStar. I told them that they'd just cost themselves far more than their cost of a single motherboard because I worked at Tiger Direct at the time and would be steering my customers AWAY from MSi products at all costs. Then I went and bought a cheap motherboard by (of all people) ECS/Elitegroup for under $50 (because this was an unexpected expense) and that thing STILL works to this day in my mother's PC:
611USLG-q5L._AC_.jpg

I haven't owned anything by MSi since and I probably never will. There's just too many better choices out there for me.
What you call "annoying crybaby articles" I actually call consumer advocacy and well, journalism. If anything the articles are not frequent and not going far enough: They should be demanding AMD and Nvidia daily for comments, going undercover as bulk purchasers to publicly denounce distributors and AIB partners that sell directly to miners or known bot scalpers just to make sure none of them do any business ever again if Eth crashes.
Remember that not everyone cares about consumers, even if they are one themselves. Some people just like to worship big, wealthy corporations and think that they can do no wrong. What's ironic is that it's far more common to see a corporation that can do no right.
 
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Nvidia and AMD are raping gamers. As was said above. They could direct sell to gamers but they are squeezing every last penny out of people through their AIB distribution system and backroom dealing. I will never pay the current prices for their cards. I have a 1071ti I picked up for $300 a while back before prices skyrocketed. It does everything I need with my 5600x @1440. I have no need to upgrade for a long time. They are slowly killing off the DIY market and leaving people with a bitter taste in their mouth.

If 3dfx company was around still I'm curios if their business model would actual favor us the consumer with this tragedy we are dealing with now ha ha.
 
While I agree with the second part of the post, saying the articles are "annoying" and "crybaby posts" implies that you think that either they're ineffective or that they're annoying because AMD and Nvidia can't do anything about the situation: Whichever it is, it's wrong: Keeping everyone keenly and constantly aware of the scarcity puts pressure on all vendors and people to stop trying to pretend things are ok and keep releasing new products that are not obtainable at all, which we know it's something they're about to do do again, probably soon.

Also it's been said constantly already but apparently it needs to be repeated: AMD and Nvidia as the core manufacturers absolutely *can* control the situation because they *can* control who are their distributors or even sell direct to customers (Or greatly expand their direct sales channel that's already in place in the case of Nvidia for example) Sure it takes money but it doesn't means they need to avoid selling *any* allocation to miners and scalpers (And to distributors they know will sell to them direct) but pretending nobody can do anything about it is just abdicating responsibility: Feign ignorance about the blatantly obvious large scale bulk sells that distributors are pushing right now and just say "We can't control them!" when you basically control 100% of the supply of GPU chips and can cut as much as well, 100% of miner sales overnight if you wanted to: A quick example is MSI: After we found out an MSI employee was scalping their own products there shouldn't have been a single new GPU allocated to them by any of their vendors, I don't care how much money they bring in there's always going to be someone else willing to take on that allocation.

What you call "annoying crybaby articles" I actually call consumer advocacy and well, journalism. If anything the articles are not frequent and not going far enough: They should be demanding AMD and Nvidia daily for comments, going undercover as bulk purchasers to publicly denounce distributors and AIB partners that sell directly to miners or known bot scalpers just to make sure none of them do any business ever again if Eth crashes.
I love the idea of putting pressure on Nvidia, AMD and vendors which are definetely involved and have some control over it but the way I see it in the end you will still give them money and there will be no repercussions for them for doing this after all is done.
 
Doesn't hurt that you really don't need anything beyond it to basically play anything you'd ever want. Yes you might need to put down some settings to low on the newest games, beats having to put down the money you need for rent or food.

You just know both AMD and Nvidia could have released the 6500 and the 3050 for desktops months ago, they just don't because they will always much rather sell you the unnecessarily powerful cards first. It's also why for example Nvidia is so obsessed with Ray Tracing: it tanks performance so badly power GPUs become relevant again because otherwise well, you could just keep using the 1050 or 1650 until the 3050 comes out if it does at all, it's only when you want the fancy reflections you won't pay atention to in game anyway that you'd want to put down more than 150 bucks (300 now due to scarcity) for a GPU.


I'm so happy with my 8GB RX 570 I got a few years ago for like $120. I dont really Pc game but it's nice to have, and with the 8GB buffer can play most games to this day on high-ish settings at 1440P native on my monitor. Granted I dont care about 60 FPS either, 30 is fine. Looking at this benchmark techspot put up my 570 is slightly beating the 1650 and that's before taking the 8GB advantage into account.

I've thought of selling it, I dont really Pc game, and it would fetch seemingly 3-400 on ebay. But then I'd have to get a bargain basement GT 130 or something to literally output to my monitor (running a Ryzen 5 2600) which run like $130. So is it worth maybe 200 to part with my 570? Nah.

I'm pretty sure my PC gaming time has come to an end, I have a Series X. Would cost like 1k to get a better GPU than the one in Series X. Again, I dont Pc game, but I used to like to have my PC GPU be more powerful than my console one, to give it a reason to exist. That's not happening anytime soon for me.
 
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