ARICH5 :
that raises an interesting question. is there something that gpu makers can OMIT in their gpu's that would make the card unattractive to miners, but still benefit the gamer?
what is it specificcaly in the gpu that the miner uses and omit that what the gamer doesnt use?
It is a good question, though I think looking at this the other way around might make more sense. What could manufacturers change on mining-specific cards to encourage large-scale miners to buy them instead of gaming cards? By selling the miners cards that are more efficient for mining but unusable for gaming, they could avoid a situation where the market is eventually flooded with used gaming cards when a popular cryptocurrency goes bust.
One thing I can think of would be multi-gpu single-card designs. I suspect that packing multiple, undervolted GPU cores on a single card would require less power for a given amount of computational workload, and allow more GPUs to be installed in the same amount of space. There might also be less cost involved in building a card equipped with four GPUs than four cards equipped with one. So, by buying a card like that, the miners might not only pay less for the card initially, but also pay less in ongoing electrical costs.
These cards could also be made unusable for gaming to prevent them from potentially flooding the market down the line, while further optimizing their production costs, by omitting anything not required for mining. For mining, they might not require anything more than a PCIe x1 connection, so there should be no need to wire up traces for a whole x16 slot. They shouldn't need any sort of display outputs or associated hardware either. Plus, they would only require enough cooling to handle the card in its undervolted state, so the coolers wouldn't need to be overbuilt to handle gaming loads. The only issue I could potentially see with making the cards unsuitable for gaming is that some miners might not be willing to invest in cards that might not have much resale value once they are unprofitable for mining. On the other hand, if the reduced production costs were to make them notably less expensive to begin with, that might help make up for it.
There's also the issue of the supply of the GPU wafers themselves though. Nvidia and AMD might not want to make a huge production run of GPU wafers planned for cryptocurrency cards, when the popularity of those cryptocurrencies can vary wildly. Of course, those chips could always be put into gaming cards instead if that were to happen, and they wouldn't have to worry as much about those cards having to compete with used mining cards.
synphul :
There's also no 'health meter' or 'odometer' for a gpu. At least when you buy a used vehicle you can see how used. What is used, 40k miles or 350k miles? There's a big difference and it's at least some indication of useful life left. Nothing like that exists for the gpu and if it's been run hard and someone buys it at a nice discount for $200 when the card is a $380 gpu but it fails in some way 2 weeks later that's an expensive paperweight.
That's another thing that could be added to make gaming cards used for mining less attractive for resale. Lots of other computer hardware has usage tracking built-in, so why not graphics cards? Hard drives have SMART data that records these kinds of things, allowing a person to check how many hours the drive has been powered on, how much of that time the drive was sleeping, how many times it spins up, its maximum recorded operating temperatures, and so on. Some other hardware like certain monitors and motherboards track usage hours as well. It wouldn't be hard for graphics cards to record that kind of data, and make it easily viewable from the card's control panel. That way, someone could see if a card has been running at load for 5,000 hours, with an average operating temperature of 80C, for example, or if a prior owner had the card heavily overclocked or constantly thermal throttling. If this information were easily accessible, people might come to expect this data being listed when buying a used card.
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