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Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

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Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#791
post #441

This won't really do anything for availability or reducing scalper pricing. Miners are a sizeable proportion of sales but far from the majority. Gamers will be able to buy more of these GPUs but less of the non-LHR or AMD GPU's. GPU prices won't actually change. The real reason Nvidia is doing this is that when mining profitability inevitably drops, either because of a crypto price crash or Ethereum moving to Proof o…

Is it unsophisticated of me to assume that an ETH crash will just cause everyone with GPUs to switch to a different cryptocurrency? I'd expect miner demand to remain firm unless there's a broad crash.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#792

A major bad point with this is when the mining cards become obsolete, they won't be able to be used as a graphics card in a computer due to it not being able to output to a display. So realistically it will decrease avaliable graphic card supply to gamers in the future who are maybe looking for a cheap used graphics card (therefore pushing people to buy a new card instead). Short term fix, long term problem. I was th…

How big is the used market for graphics cards though? Common advice is to avoid buying used unless you also price in the risk that the card was used as a miner and hasn't been taken care of. Aside from the recent drought of GPUs and pricing madness, you could buy low-end current-gen cards that could outperform higher-end previous-gen parts.

Used graphics card were/are a big market (even though new cards depeciate massively when used). Usually crypto cards still last a decent amount of time (and might even have been thrashed while water cooled to keep them healthy). The price of them make up for the fact they have been ran constantly. And the price makes up for the fact of being outdated in-terms of performance. They are great for budget PC's. Many people still buy GTX 970's etc.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#793
post #205

A major bad point with this is when the mining cards become obsolete, they won't be able to be used as a graphics card in a computer due to it not being able to output to a display. So realistically it will decrease avaliable graphic card supply to gamers in the future who are maybe looking for a cheap used graphics card (therefore pushing people to buy a new card instead). Short term fix, long term problem. I was th…

There are tons of use cases for GPUs outside of output to a display: audio/video encoding, render farms, scientific computing.

True. I just assumed people (or most likely companies) who are doing these types of things generally will be buying the latest GPU new as they have more money to spend (and want to get a good life out of the card).

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#794

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scalpers hurt literally everyone. They help people who are willing to pay the higher prices, and they provide a market signal encouraging producers to increase output.

The issue is that production is inelastic compared to demand, so scalping provides no additional value and creates higher prices by making demand seem even higher.

It also creates an incentive for those unwilling to pay high prices to find ways to do without, or to delay their purchase until production has caught up.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is this actually true or merely a theoretical thought? On one hand you have FCA (I'm sorry, Stellantis ) which leans into its not so positive reputation and does just fine. The other hand you have Toyota who spend the 90s and 00s digging a goodwill moat in the minds of premium consumers. Both approaches work but for different demographics. You'll never see a 4Runner with a magnetic company sticker sitting in an indu…

> Both approaches work but for different demographics. You'll never see a 4Runner with a magnetic company sticker sitting in an industrial parking lot or in less well off part of town and you'll never see a Pacifica in an upscale suburban driveway. Huh? Pacificas are everywhere, especially since they also have the only PHEV minivan in the US. In the PHEV Pacifica FB group I'm in (I do own one, so I am a bit biased he…

Pacificas are very common in upscale suburban driveways. Source: live in an upscale suburb with lots of Pacificas in the driveways. Honda Odysseys and Toyota Siennas are popular as well but probably not as much as the Pacifica.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You came sooooo close to hitting the nail on the head. The first owners have a huge effect on a resale value of a vehicle. Who buys Toyotas? Why are those people's cars more valuable on the used market than corporate fleet's used cars? Now see if your model explains the used value of a Dodge Journey, oilfield pickup and whatever car grandma owned. Nissan spend the '00s selling to owners who's used cars are not held i…

There's also material differences, there's a reason the Nissan CEO from that era is currently a fugitive and on trial for financial misconduct. And not by some technicality either, he literally hired a paramilitary group to disguise themselves as musicians and smuggle him out of Japan while on bail. Since 2001 Nissan has used their defective CVT transmission in the vast majority of their lineup from the compact Versa…

Until Masayoshi Son & friends face the music, or the convincion rates drop from a comical 98%, I'm inclined to believe this was entirely politically motivated.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#798

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also sometimes do GPU BIOS modifications, which is a fun thing to discover once the card ends up on the second-hand market and you happen to buy one. Luckily the fix is to reflash the BIOS using a matching one from TechPowerUp GPU database, but this assumes that you even know that this is something to pay attention to. Source: happened with an RX 560 that I bought second-hand. Driver installation failed in Windo…

Any idea what they modified?

I didn't check it, but if I had to guess, it might have to do something with allowing the card to run using settings that make it more suitable for mining. Someone more familiar with GPU mining can correct me here.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#799
post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the issues people have mentioned in this thread is that cards sold by miners are often burnt out or nearly burnt out. In that case, it seems like cutting off miners from the secondary market would be an improvement for the secondary market.

I someone who hasn't bought a /new/ card since a 980ti, I find this talk of 'crypto burned gpus' to be a bunch of hooey. 1080ti x3, 1660ti x2, 2080ti x2... (We keep three gamers in cards around here, those aren't 'oh noes, this one fried, get another)... not one of them has had an issue. Nor did the six P104s I picked up for an research project. And those cards smelled.. funny. I'm pretty sure they'd never seen airco…

Its an issue most people don't worry about because they're running exactly 1 GPU, which they wanted because they wanted to game, and if it dies, it dies.

But Google, Amazon et al. are very familiar with the concept of hardware lifetimes. Internally, calculations for some algorithms are done based on MTBF values for components - i.e. the cost of doing a thing is a certain number of CPU-hours, and you know a CPU will give you X-hours before it's liable to be hardware-dead.

A second hand gaming GPU has a very different power-on profile to a mining GPU - a gamer is going to struggle to on average put more then 4 hours a day or so through a card, most likely less. A miner is going to have that thing powered on the whole time, permanently. Even if the GPU is fine, the DDR RAM has been aging and that stuff fails faster.

The short answer is: people are going to be asking for a discount based on the expected lifetime of ex-miner hardware, once we know what that is. If the answer is "well it might last 6 months or it might last till you replace your machine" then the price will now reflect that expectation and risk profile. Not to mention the dilution factor which will be actually failing hardware being sold off by miners without properly marking it - after all, you might as well let someone gamble that bit flips in the GPU only lead to graphics aberrations rather then bad hashes.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#800
post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This all feels like a buffering problem. Can power companies not just buy big batteries... you wouldn't even need that many, just enough to signal generators to do the right thing. (Also no idea all the gadgets in-between house and generators, but assuming all the gadgets can handle load going in and out)

Part of that storage problem is what Tesla and Australia did. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/australia-picks... And there are other approaches to power storage. Thermal power storage is popular / useful with large solar installations. Hydro dams associated with a reservoir often have pumped storage where they can pump water back into the reservoir and then use it when its needed. The signaling and frequ…

I think your last challenges the concept of who exactly is the consumer?

Thanks for the thoughtful reply!

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