"GPU chips, the new gold ?"
Yeah, but this is "gold" that has an expiry date. Sure, the price has gone up in the short term. But wait for the next 2 generations of process nodes to come out and watch the value of those chips fall. This is "gold" that 'rots' over time.
Back in the late 80's I bought a monolithic memories 'justram-AT' memory expansion board for the PC. It cost as much as a whole PC by itself, around $1800, which at the time was pretty expensive in terms of the number of hours you would have to work in order to buy one. It was a full-length ISA card populated with 256K drams in vertically stacked SIP packages. The capacity was 8 MB, and at the time, when a standard PC had 640K RAM, it was a huge amount of memory, almost unheard of in a PC. That was around 1987. The software I worked on used to ship with two of those cards installed, giving 16MB of RAM in the machine. It would be equivalent to having something like a terabyte of RAM in a PC today.
This picture is a 2MB card from the same time period, I can't find a photo of the 8MB card, but it gives you an idea of what these things were like. The 8MB card I am talking about had a mezzanine piggy-back board with all the dram chips in SIP packages, at the time it was very high density electronics. They were built by MMI in the US.
That memory card would be essentially worthless as a functional unit now, unless it has become a collectors item due to scarcity. I'm sure most that were made are now in landfill. Whereas if I had spent the same amount of money buying actual gold coins, they would be worth as much or more now, in terms of their buying power, as they were then. If I had put the money into a tracker fund... well, you know the answer.
So, if you bought a graphics card a year or two ago and it is now fetching double or treble what you paid for it... if it's sitting in a drawer unused, then sell it and realise your gain, before the expiry date approaches. Don't assume that if you keep it another 5 years, that it will still be worth as much.
