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…
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
#792A 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.
Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#793A 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.
Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#794Earlier 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.
Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#795Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#796Earlier 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…
Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#797Earlier 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…
Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#798Earlier 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?
Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
#799Earlier 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…
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
#800Earlier 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…
Thanks for the thoughtful reply!