All Eyes On Graphics Card Shortage, Few Answers Forthcoming

[InvalidError]

All i saying AMD or Nvidia should prevent mining from non-specialized mining graphics card.

There is no way for them to do that as mining is just one specific class of GPGPU applications. The only way to prevent it for certain would be to nuke GPGPU from GPUs but that would be a problem for newer software that use DirectCompute, OpenCL or CUDA for GPU acceleration.

Most crypto-currencies are open standards. If AMD or Nvidia decided to block one mining application, people would simply create forks to bypass driver locks.

 

[coondawg]

The money isn't in mining Ether; it's in waiting 3 weeks for the craze to die down and everyone to dump their almost-new graphics cards on eBay for almost nothing. Market will be seriously over-saturated. You could probably buy them used after the crash, wait a couple months, then sell them again for a small profit. (Or I mean, you can be boring and just upgrade your desktop(s) for cheap.)

 

[falchard]

I am contemplating selling my R9 Fury X I bought back in January for $300. Looks like they are on EBay for $500.

 

[blackbit75]

I don't care. I will not buy any.

 

[blackbit75]

People is mining because of the high prices of bitcoins. The high prices are because of the last attacks, but if you look at the beginning of the year, its price is a third.
But anyway I will not buy it. I can wait 2 or 3 years before I buy a new graphics card. It's nice to have an APU.

 

[SockPuppet]

In no universe is selling too much of your goods a bad thing.

 

[hannibal]

Vega has no problems with eutherium because HBM is not very good for maining that. Also vega is too expensive. But ofcourse there Are other coins that may work very well with Vega, so who knows.

 

[bak0n]

I don't get it. My GTX 1060 is barely profitable using nicehash. Why would people be buying them up in hordes for what may not even see an RoI, ever.

 

[loki1944]

"quiet period"?

 

[cryoburner]

I don't get it. My GTX 1060 is barely profitable using nicehash. Why would people be buying them up in hordes for what may not even see an RoI, ever.

You'll notice that the price increases haven't affected the 1060 quite as much as some other cards, but without those other cards available for purchase, more people who would have bought them might go with a 1060 instead. Its main competitors, the Radeon RX 580, 570, 480 and 470 have all been sold out for the last month or more, so anyone interested in a card around that performance level has to go with a 1060. The closest other viable options would be the 1050 Ti, which offers notably lower performance, or the 1080, which costs significantly more.

I also imagine that the 1060s are more efficient in dedicated mining systems with eight underclocked cards. Perhaps not as much as the Radeons or the 1070, but with the prices of those cards pushed to prohibitive levels, 1060s are likely becoming the next best thing. Many of these people are also probably hoping that the value of the currency will rise, so that they can cash in their coins later when they might be worth more.

 

[mitch074]

I don't get it. My GTX 1060 is barely profitable using nicehash. Why would people be buying them up in hordes for what may not even see an RoI, ever.

Because RX470D/470/480/570/580 are pretty much out of stock everywhere, so the next in line is Nvidia's chip. the fact that miners will need the 6 Gb version (as the 3Gb version has too little VRAM to hold a complete Ethereum hash in memory) which used to be quite a bit more expensive than AMD's Polaris 10 is the only thing that saved it until now. RX470D with 4Gb is the best bang for buck you could get for mining, as it enjoys very high memory throughput and still has enough GPU power to actually process the hash.

 

[InvalidError]

Vega has no problems with eutherium because HBM is not very good for maining that.

Price aside, HBM seems perfect for Ethereum: it's got the low latency required to quickly fetch the pseudo-random hash block chunks and the bandwidth to quickly transfer those chunks between the RAM and GPU.

With Ethereum's working block size likely to exceed 4GB within the next three months, GPUs are going to lose a large chunk of their Ethereum mining appeal soon enough: once that happens, a 8GB GPU's throughput will get cut in half due to the VRAM only being large enough to hold one working set compared to as many as seven in the early days.

 

[mitch074]

With Ethereum's working block size likely to exceed 4GB within the next three months, GPUs are going to lose a large chunk of their Ethereum mining appeal soon enough: once that happens, a 8GB GPU's throughput will get cut in half due to the VRAM only being large enough to hold one working set compared to as many as seven in the early days.

That's still much better than 4Gb cards that won't hold a complete working set, forcing a bunch of RAM <> VRAM swaps.

 

[mrjhh]

My guess is that much of the capacity is going to cloud providers and related cloud-scale operations like Facebook for machine learning use cases, and that only the leftovers are making it into GPUs.

 

[AcostaJA]

Ethereum will switch to Proof of Stake algorithm instead Proof of Work, this will happen according the developers in the next 9 months, proof of stake dont need heavy compute capabilities, instead it rewards you in proportion of your stake (miner address should have an stake in Eth, this stake will take the place of the H/W cost) as is needed for long term network sustainability (its unfeasible to mantain a network that just spend Gigawats of power just hashng and hashing every transaction, while actually few hash are mandatory).

As P.O.S. (proof of stake, not piece of s...) its succefully implemented even Bitcoin will switch via uasf to POS).

So be careful if you think to invest in GPU (And ASIC) mining, it wll be a short lived hobby-business.

 

[tonytran]

Meh sold my Gigabyte GTX980 G1 for $450AUD on EBay and used the money to fund my MSI GTX1080 DUKE upgrade which I bought from Newegg Australia for $650 which is very cheap because they cost about $900-$1000 in Australia Online Components Stores.

The MSI GTX1080 DUKE got sold out next following day same as the ZOTAC GTX1080 AMP Edition $720 sold out as well on Newegg Australia because that card cost $850 in Australia at Scorptech.com.

 

[kyotokid]

...I personally am really angered by this. These (in my book dishonest) "speculators" driving up the costs for GPU cards for their own personal profit is just wrong. Most of us 3D enthusiasts do not have the budgets to pay premium prices that are far higher than what should be the normal cost for a GPU card. 1070s right now are going for almost as much if not more than a 1080 Ti because of this.

 

[InvalidError]

Most of us 3D enthusiasts do not have the budgets to pay premium prices that are far higher than what should be the normal cost for a GPU card.

If you don't want to pay current inflated prices, there is a very simple solution: wait. Nobody is holding a gun to your head telling you to upgrade your GPU today.

Ethereum is designed to become more memory-hungry over time and GPU mining will die once the working block size exceeds what can comfortably sit in VRAM.

 

[mitch074]

If we could sum it up?

• 
  ■yes, GPU hardware dies - electromigration, blown capacitor, fried VRM... Can kill a GPU.
  ■hot-and-cold cycles do damage electronical components, but sustained edge-level temperatures are actually worse, as no-one pulls the plug on a computer to shut it down nowadays.
  ■3Gb cards are already useless for ethereum mining, 4Gb will soon be, 6 and 8 Gb cards will probably be out of stock for a while.
  ■if you need to build a computer today, your choices are pretty much limited to Radeon RX560 and Geforce 1080. Note that, having bought a 4Gb RX560 for a build recently, I find it's still a decent piece of hardware.

 

[Broadbanned]

It would be best if newer GPUs instantly fried the entire system once mining started. Every mining system, every time, burn it to the ground. Also, bankrupt the person using a gaming card to mine, bankrupt their children, grandchildren, and anyone even slightly related to them. Miners: Go DIAF

 

[shrapnel_indie]

...I personally am really angered by this. These (in my book dishonest) "speculators" driving up the costs for GPU cards for their own personal profit is just wrong. Most of us 3D enthusiasts do not have the budgets to pay premium prices that are far higher than what should be the normal cost for a GPU card. 1070s right now are going for almost as much if not more than a 1080 Ti because of this.

Speculation is a part of any stock market, especially when dealing with commodities (i.e. coffee.)

 

[shrapnel_indie]

It would be best if newer GPUs instantly fried the entire system once mining started. Every mining system, every time, burn it to the ground. Also, bankrupt the person using a gaming card to mine, bankrupt their children, grandchildren, and anyone even slightly related to them. Miners: Go DIAF

... and what happens if you build with that tech and you get a false positive just as you fire up your newest favorite game that some joker at the publishing company decided that it was only going to be good for an install on a single specific computer? (There's software out there that already limits it to a single PC, period, no exceptions. I'm not talking Windows either.)

 

[Robert Collins]

Nobody wants miner cards. Crypto miners fully intend to resale the cards. Mining is a boom bust business. A month ago a 1070 made 6.00 a day in profit. Currently it is down to 1.50 and trending lower. The point to unload may be close at hand. A real problem will be when miners flood the market with cards on the edge of death. I have only seen one videocard die in the last 20 years and it was a fanless card with monster heatsink. Card death is likly to become more common and there is no odometer on a video card.

 

[InvalidError]

A real problem will be when miners flood the market with cards on the edge of death.

Ethereum is designed to be memory-bound. It doesn't stress the GPU's compute anywhere near as much as Bitcoin did, therefore GPUs used for Ethereum will be nowhere near the "edge of death" after a few months of use.

 

[ddferrari]

If you don't believe that is true, then you must be under the impression that computer hardware lasts forever. If that is the case, I don't know what to say to you.

I don't understand your reasoning though. The cards are designed and tested to run at its max TDP for years but somehow mining for a few months makes them break? Of course there are defects that cause premature failures. Are you saying they purposely design their products to fail from mining, which doesn't even max out the card? If that is the case, again that is a huge defect and the justification for a class action lawsuit against both amd and nvidia. If you got proof that mining damages the graphics card or that they are designing them to fail rapidly (cant think of any other reason they would do this other than for financial gain) then speak up.

Assuming ignorance because I don't agree with your conjecture is quite asinine especially coming from a Tom's staff member.

If you don't want your comments to be misconstrued, perhaps you should stop with the snappy one-liners, which are wide open to interpretation. And your "they either work or they don't" assertion obviously shows that you have a very shallow understanding of how electronics work. Then you made yourself look even worse by challenging a TH staff member after you clearly made an ignorant statement.