Who knows where these parts are made, somewhere in Malaysia perhaps. Then they are sold and branded. There may be quite a long line of middlemen. Once I thought IBM makes laptop computers, while they were only branded IBM and made by Quanta. There used to be only three manufacturers of LCD panels, but how many different brands are selling LCD displays branded as their own.

I started trying to begin a full system upgrade iin May 2019 when I ordered the moxt expensive motherboard I have ever attempted, a Z490 by SuperMicro. In May it was 350 bux but I figured it was worth it because I've worked with a lot of SuperMicro server systems and they were absolutely superb. The Z490 has server quality components (even a real PLX chip) but with a huge bent toward multimedia and gaming. Seemed the perfect blend to me. I got 2 bad boards in a row and initially they were great to deal with BUT now that the very same board has gone up to 450 from a combination of shortages and demand, I seriously doubt they will replace the last bad one for me even though I have zoomed photos and a video of components and the first power-up.

I did get the impression that Supermicro support is also compromised not only by lack of parts availability but also look down their noses at Supero the division that handles gaming enthusiast boards instead of "real" big iron as if it is shameful and demeans the company name. So after 6 months of run around, I bought an Asus.

In my experience, the pandemic is disrupting manufacturing and therefore supply lines.

Zareason attributed the failure of their company in part to supply line issues caused by the pandemic.

The local office supply store I use has been without complete sets of cartridges for my printer for months (though I was able to find them online and in stock from another vendor).

Most computers are assembled in China and other countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Taiwan. The companies in Taiwan generally sub-contract the actual assembly to companies on mainland China. I've wondered why no "Made in China" label is on electronic hardware the way it is on clothing.

It's done on percentages. A complicated business. ≥35% of value is a threshold, IIRC.

i usually try to avoid chinese made stuff, and i am not the only one, that's why there are no "made in china" label on computer parts , imo.

A similar thing happened to me, the board I bought is now cheaper than it was when bought it, and the same computer shop doesn't even have it listed on their website anymore (it was listed when I saw they'd dropped the price of it, but the other day when I looked it was nowhere to be seen). I should have waited a bit longer since the board I bought is a Gen9 Asus board with an Intel chipset. Since I could have got a Gen10 board with an Intel-based chipset instead, and the Intel Gen10 Core processors aren't compatible with a Gen8/9 socket. So I'd have to buy both a new board and a new processor for it if I wanted to move to a Gen10 board/processor - but I could still use the memory I've got and everything else though.

I had to wait a couple of weeks for the PCIe video card I bought, but I don't think that was because of covid though.

yup, i also bought a new GPU from that same shop where i bought that bundle, 2.12.2020 and it arrived week a go, it is nvidia rtx 3060 ti, atleast i got it somewhat fast from them. one computer magazine said those cards have limited supply. i think i were lucky to get it.

just checked it out, nvidia rtx 3060 ti were 549 € when i bought it, now it is 769,90 €.

holy sh#t

My video card is the SAPPHIRE PULSE RX 5600 XT (AMD based card), as I got sick and tired of having to install the NVIDIA drivers and like the fact AMD have open-sourced their drivers. Therefore I can just install my distro and the drivers get installed as a part of the distro install. And it's a pain in the ass to have to worry about whether the open-source NVIDIA drivers are going to be up to the job - as I always found the drivers from NVIDIA to perform far better than the open-source drivers.

OK, I know my question is off topic, but I have asked it before and never got an answer. nVidia has NVEnc, this is AVC/HEVC/V9 hardware encoding. I purchased nVidia GTX 1660 to get NVEnc and it can do in minutes what my Intel i7-7700K did in hours using software encoding.

Does AMD have anything similar?

i use arch on my main box, haven't had problems with nvidia drivers, knocks on wood.

In Electronics hardware, there's actually a limited hardware chain, exactly because of the problems you describe.

Manufacturer --> Distributor --> Agent --> Retailer.

Retailers sell one-off units to you. Agents have an MOQ of typically ≅€500, and distributors based on whatever the manufacturer MOQ is. There are also brokers, who are opportunists, and their MOQ is inclined to be their entire stock of that part. The only time I had to go to a distributor for parts was when I wanted some thing the equivalent of a ULN 2007 (7 individually switched drivers) but FET instead of bipolar. They quoted 6 months lead time, and delivered on time, and not before. By that time, I had given up on them, rejigged the pc, written the software, and delivered the product.

Because I use Slackware s my daily driver (and have for 20+ years) and because Slackware is vanilla and because I prefer rerolling my kernel for extreme low latency for DAW work and multimedia including gaming, I tend to config and compile a new kernel quite soon after release. I don't have to wait for some repository to build one for me and my distro. So once or twice, maybe 3 times in 20 years, I've had to wait a few days before the newest NVIDIA-foo.run installer could complete but that time has always been mere days and if you do anything intensely 3D or needing hardware acceleration, nobody is Nvidia's equal on Linux IMHO.

i agree with that, i have been testing couple of times hashcat, it can use CUDA cores.
very big difference in performance.

in the future i am going to mine Ethereum, (i've got nvidia rtx 3060 ti card ) just to test if it is profitable.

I had a thread on that a while back. Special purpose ASICS are the way to go, it seems.