I did a little excel math and the numbers suggest to me that even with the increased prices, it’s worth it to buy cards at the marked up prices. This doesn’t take everything into account, such as the cost of the rest of the rig, but it gives a me good general idea of what to expect. It’s based on 2/4/2021 figures from whattomine.com and stockx.com
Even if the value of Ethereum cut in half tomorrow, i’d still break even within a year.
Plus, with the way things are going, GPUs won’t be restocked in a meaningful way until this summer. The markups only add about two and a half months to the break even time…