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Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

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Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like I bought it in June of 2018, and BTC was ~$6k, which was $7k down from its previous high in December of 2017. It would drop another $3k by January of 2019. At least, that's what the first graph I found said.

Nobody has used GPUs for mining bitcoin in nearly 10 years, my point was telling you what they were using them for

BTC and ETH are closely correlated price-wise.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#92
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imposing global technological bans so willy-nilly seems like a nice idea only on the surface. Things like machine drying your clothes at home in the US (uncommon in Europe so seems frivolous) uses as much if not more energy. Others might consider gaming or self-hosted servers or who knows what else equally inefficient. Do you really want to put things so easily on the potential chopping block even if this one thing y…

A single miner uses 1,300W (Antminer S9) and runs 24/7. That is 218,400Wh for a week. A gaming computer at ~400W, left on 24/7, is 67,200Wh. That assumes you are playing 24/7 - your idle wattage in sleep is If you run your dryer every night of the week for an hour, you are using about 38,400Wh. You can game 24/7 and dry your clothes every night of the week and STILL use less power than a modern, efficient single mine…

Yes, but the real question always is:

Who will make a decision as to what is considered frivolous.

Not to search very far, I consider trucks in US for non-contractor use to be frivolous, but I don't go around telling people those need to be banned.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#93
post #28

World really needs a ban on PoW cryptocurrencies. I guess on one side lot of people is not caring about it as long as they make some money of it, and in the other side maybe other people in power, is not caring as that would make a perfect excuse to ban any kind of cryptocurrency. I guess too we all will care as soon as the devastation caused by the climate change becomes a massive life threatening issue.

PoW really is the tragedy of the commons epitomized. The only way it could be more on the nose is if mining literally required a random human being to die.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#94
post #28

World really needs a ban on PoW cryptocurrencies. I guess on one side lot of people is not caring about it as long as they make some money of it, and in the other side maybe other people in power, is not caring as that would make a perfect excuse to ban any kind of cryptocurrency. I guess too we all will care as soon as the devastation caused by the climate change becomes a massive life threatening issue.

Banning = Authoritarian Madness. Bans are never the answer unless you are a fascist. This is an attack on general purpose computing. You cannot tell people what they can and can’t do with their machines. You can try, but the smart ones will tell you to go f yourself. Deal with the supply side costs, and let people do whatever math they like.

Poisoning the water supply to increase the margin on bottled water is a valid business plan. Banning that is a good answer, and neither authoritarian nor fascist.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd expect otherwise actually. RDNA is far more efficient at gaming. GCN was compute-focused (higher TFLOPs, but weaker in practice). Case in point, micro-benchmarks show that VRAM latency is ~100 nanoseconds on RDNA, but ~300 nanoseconds on GCN. RX 6500 XT is aimed at roughly the same specs as the RX480, but should perform slightly faster in practice, along with Raytracing support, Infinity Cache and therefore faste…

If we look at the benchmarks of the 5500XT vs the RX480 I expect it to maybe be 5-8% faster if at all. AMD basically released this card 3 times now but this time they scrubbed the whole encoding feature set.

> AMD basically released this card 3 times now but this time they scrubbed the whole encoding feature set.

Do you not see the difference between GCN, RDNA, and RDNA 2?

At a minimum, this RDNA 2 6500 XT has raytracing cores that the two previous versions do not have. I'd assume that most video gamers care more about the raytracing feature (especially as more and more games are using it) than H265 encoding.

Remember: Raytracing instructions were invented on RDNA2. The 5500 doesn't have it, and the 480 doesn't have it.

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I mean, seriously. Would you rather have the existence of this card? Or the non-existence? If you want something faster, that's why the 6800 exists. This 6500 XT is for people who want a barely-gaming ready card at the cheapest possible price. If that's not your use case, then don't buy the card.

But every now and then, I build a computer for a child who doesn't play many video games, or for some uncle/aunt who doesn't know much about computers. I never like the idea of going iGPU only, because these people inevitably find at least one weird game that they like to play. So I like to put in a $100 to $200-class card in there. Not expensive enough to break the budget, but high enough that it'd perform decently on 10-year-old games and maybe a few indie-games.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#96
post #45
post #28

World really needs a ban on PoW cryptocurrencies. I guess on one side lot of people is not caring about it as long as they make some money of it, and in the other side maybe other people in power, is not caring as that would make a perfect excuse to ban any kind of cryptocurrency. I guess too we all will care as soon as the devastation caused by the climate change becomes a massive life threatening issue.

Imposing global technological bans so willy-nilly seems like a nice idea only on the surface. Things like machine drying your clothes at home in the US (uncommon in Europe so seems frivolous) uses as much if not more energy. Others might consider gaming or self-hosted servers or who knows what else equally inefficient. Do you really want to put things so easily on the potential chopping block even if this one thing y…

There are plenty of other wasteful activities that should be limited as well.

Classic whataboutism. First of all your entire comparison makes no sense, you have to compare alternatives for use. What's the alternative to a dryer. Using a line and hanging your clothes. Fair enough, what about in the winter in New York? A ventless dryer? Doesn't use substantially less energy. And so forth.

For every conceivable use case there exists alternatives that use orders of magnitude less energy. NFTs, sending money, federated computing, you name it, something already exists.

The only reason blockchain is a thing is because cryptocurrencies are booming in terms of how much they're sold for. The end.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#97
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single miner uses 1,300W (Antminer S9) and runs 24/7. That is 218,400Wh for a week. A gaming computer at ~400W, left on 24/7, is 67,200Wh. That assumes you are playing 24/7 - your idle wattage in sleep is If you run your dryer every night of the week for an hour, you are using about 38,400Wh. You can game 24/7 and dry your clothes every night of the week and STILL use less power than a modern, efficient single mine…

It doesn't make sense to compare 1 person gaming or clothes drying to a specific mining machine. The consideration was about global bans and total outputs from those activities.

Bitcoin mining uses more power than the country of Sweden.

[1] - https://www.thebalance.com/how-much-power-does-the-bitcoin-n...

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#98
post #45
post #28

World really needs a ban on PoW cryptocurrencies. I guess on one side lot of people is not caring about it as long as they make some money of it, and in the other side maybe other people in power, is not caring as that would make a perfect excuse to ban any kind of cryptocurrency. I guess too we all will care as soon as the devastation caused by the climate change becomes a massive life threatening issue.

Imposing global technological bans so willy-nilly seems like a nice idea only on the surface. Things like machine drying your clothes at home in the US (uncommon in Europe so seems frivolous) uses as much if not more energy. Others might consider gaming or self-hosted servers or who knows what else equally inefficient. Do you really want to put things so easily on the potential chopping block even if this one thing y…

Governments could apply a carbon and electronic waste offset tax to declared cryptocurrency income. The people making money from cryptocurrencies should pay enough to fund projects that will fully offset their environmental costs.

Of course, those taxes will probably just disappear into general tax revenues and wind up paying for other things, but it would encourage crypto miners to pursue green energy sources and, perhaps, find better uses for obsolete graphics cards.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#99
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That solves nothing, it only lines politician’s pockets. The cost of electricity is the deterrent currently, which is why you don’t see everyone mining. If you want to make electricity cost more, it’ll “solve” more than crypto mining, it’ll just make mostly poor people have a lower standard of life.

The best carbon fee proposals refund the money to taxpayers, equal amount per person. If you emit less CO2 than average, as most poor people do, then you come out ahead.

It doesn’t make much sense, how would money be guaranteed to come back after making its way to through the government and back? The cost of electricity already functions more efficiently; don’t take money out of peoples pockets so you don’t need to give it back.

A pigovian tax by insurance would work better, I definitely think environmental protection is needed but politicians will just use the money they get in nefarious ways.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#100
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or a carbon tax and solve the problem at source.

any infrastructure dedicated to the mining of crypto is opportunity cost. Even if you use renewables, that energy could instead replace traditional energy sources which could be turned off. This is an example of Jevon's paradox, namely that increases in efficiency or quality are offset by increases in demand. It's one of the reasons why we have globally barely made a dent when it comes to the increase of renewables a…

> This is an example of Jevon's paradox, namely that increases in efficiency or quality are offset by increases in demand.

That is kinda the main point of a carbon tax... it is to make carbon usage LESS efficient, since you have to pay an extra tax in addition to the cost of the energy itself. Ideally, the money gained from the carbon tax is then redistributed to everyone equally, and that money can then be used for whatever you want.

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