Anyway, I had put off buying a GPU for a bit, but now I'm thinking about pulling the trigger by the end of the month.
So, for under $200, is an RX 470 or a GTX 1050 with 4GB still my best bet?
Keep in mind I have the option to pick one up in Germany, just mentioning it for availability reasons—though I doubt the prices will be significantly different.
The situation in Germany and everywhere else globally is pretty much identical to what we're seeing here. You might want to check out their Geizhals site (it's like using a price comparison tool like Google Shopping)
Roughly $1233 for an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070, whereas the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB models were going for about $767 (and those competitive RX 480 8GB cards actually had even better pricing, sometimes dropping below $667). An NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti would run around 1250-$450, and the latter wasn't really impacted by the recent mining crisis
The entire rig pulls less than 200W at full load—the GPU itself sits right around 120W—and since this is a high-quality power supply delivering a solid 288W on the +12V rail, everything is perfectly fine.
The pricing is incredibly fair. To give you some perspective, I’ve seen similar CPUs listed for $233, and for that exact same amount, you could often snag a more powerful GPU like a Radeon 7970 or an HD 280X. Back in the day, 8GB of DDR3 used to go for under $100, and I've even spotted used 1TB hard drives going for as low as $50.
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Honestly, you should probably pull the trigger while you still can. If you try selling those three sticks of RAM—assuming that's even how people are doing it these days—and toss in another $110, you'll be sitting pretty with a GTX 1070. It’s especially worth it if you have an integrated GPU to tide you over during the swap.
It’s possible. They usually list a much longer timeframe under "standard shipping," so this isn't out of the ordinary. If they have it in stock, I’d say you can comfortably expect it to arrive well before that deadline.