http://wccftech.com/nvidia-graphics-cards-see-price-increases-starting-month-due-memory-shortage/
 
If you are thinking about buying a new Nvidia graphics card, don't wait too much or you will pay for it.

Memory prices have been increasing due to massive demand not just for graphics cards but for any item needing memory.

Thanks for the heads up. 

that actually might stabilize since the GDDR fab plants are going to make SSD ram and DDR
unless demands is increasing faster than they can produce the ram
 
 
they just need more fabs - and that will take time
 

This seems to be the 3rd time this has happened with Memory.
Well one was due to the factory was burned down but still about Memory.

It's funny that the price of DDR4 (especially) has been steadily rising due to a "shortage" of memory. When I go to my local retailer what is it they never have a shortage of??? Thaaaaaaaaat's right. Memory.

Stupid GPU mining.  All those GPUs going to miners, and of course all those GPUs need systems with RAM to plug into... May not be the direct cause, but it certainly is making the situation worse. 

It's likely NOT a cause, as most mining machines don't get build with very much RAM - and usually a LOT lower size of RAM than gamers or even most of the general public want.
 
Consider that a common mining machine runs 6 GPUs on 2 sticks of RAM, commonly 8GB or at most 16GB and sometimes as low as 4GB - and often they "get by" with ONE stick of ram since cryptocoin mining doesn't tend to put much demand on the SYSTEM memory.
Then consider that a typical gaming machine uses at least 2 and often 4 sticks of ram, commonly 16 GB OR MORE for a SINGLE or sometimes *2* GPUs.
 
 Which group are having the worse effect on system ram availability?
 GAMERS.
 
 
 BTW - GPU system building for cryptocoin mining seems to have dropped a LOT over the last couple months, stock and pricing on the top AMD RX series cards has recovered quite a lot and NVidia card pricing is almost back down to where it was in Febuary with VERY FEW availability issues any more.
I'd be inclined to say that GAMERS are the reason RAM pricing has gone very very high the last month, since they can get cards now they're building LOTS MORE SYSTEMS than most of the last few months.
 

Graphic cards use GDDR 5, GDDR 5x, or HBM 2 memory in current production cards. Add HBM 1 memory for the Fury and those 4 types are what have been used in almost all GPUs made in the last 5 years.
Motherboards use DDR 3 or DDR 4 - which is not the same but it apparently is made on the same lines with swapout of the masks and not much else.
 
FEW mining machines use GTX 1080ti or GTX 1080 cards - the bulk use AMD RX 470/480/570/580 (which is why those cards have been very short on supply and crazy-high priced for many months), some went to using NVidia GTX 1060/1070 for a while but most of THOSE were only bought because they got competative with the AMD cards for a while on cost/performance due to the price on the AMD cards getting way high.
As of RIGHT NOW, the 1060 is still pretty competative but the 1070 no longer is on a price/performance basis.
 There are more GPUs used to mine Ethereum than all other GPU-mineable cryptocoins COMBINED, by probably a 2:1 ratio or close to that - and Ethereum is quite friendly to mine on the high-end AMD RX series on a cost/hash basis (when the cards are at or near MSRP) and more-or-less a tossup with the 1070 and 1060 on a hash/watt basis.
 The GDDR 5x in the GTX 1080 and 1080ti has higher latency than the GDDR5 used in the other "good" mining cards, which handicaps the hashrate on the 1080/1080ti a LOT - for perspective, the 1080 can ALMOST match a BIOS modded AMD RX470 4GB card but at MSRP is about 3 TIMES the price, while the 1080ti is 10-20% faster than a BIOS modded RX 480/580 8GB card but costs MORE than 3 times the price at MSRP.
 
 There are other cryptocoins that the high-end Nvidia cards ARE good at, and comparable on a price/performance basis at MSRP - ZCash would be the biggest - but those coins are a LOT smaller by any measure than Ethereum.
 
 I would estimate that the most common "mining rig" uses a fairly low-end Intel motherboard with at least 6 PCI-E slots (but most of those slots will be x1 slots), a low-end G-series Pentium, a pair of the lowest-cost 2GB or 4GB DDR4 ram sticks, whatever the cheapest SSD or hard drive or even USB KEY in the 30-60 GB size range is available, 6 GPUs on x1-x16 "USB-style" risers, and enough power supply to run everything (EVGA G2/P2 series is a popular choice as power supplies are one of the few areas a mining rig tends to NOT skimp on for reliability).
 It probably runs LINUX in some form, both for better reliability and much lower COST, and commonly will use a "free mining specific" distribution or Ubuntu.
 

Looks like the price increase is happening 

 
I just reserved one from a local store for $780 + tax I can't wait anymore, I just had to bite the bullet if these are going to be the prices.

Odd, I just saw several prices DROP on NVidia cards - but they were GTX 1070 models so perhaps the "due to shortage gouge pricing" going away is making up for the cost of RAM increase.