Do you remember NVidia's feeble attempt to lock us out with LHR? This was to pretend they care about gamers and pretend to care about gamers crying about frame rates. They didn't give a hoot about gamers at all. Let me explain. After LHR came out, they decided to use a bunch of dies that didn't pass quality control, and turn them into CMP mining cards. One problem: they came with a 3 month warranty, no resalability, can't game, no outputs, and costs more than RTX cards. Why is any miner going to buy that? If they really gave a hoot about the gamers, here's what they would have done
Let's take a look at what MSRP of gamer cards at that time were
3090 - $1499
3080 - $999
3070 - $649
3060Ti - $499
They decided to release LHR and then CMP mining cards. A CMP30 equivalent to a 1660 Super was $700. That's insane. They put on LHR, launched a big marketing campaign that said: HAVE NO FEAR GAMERS!!!!! WERE COMING!!!!!! when really what they wanted to do was LHR the cards, then charge triple for their respective CMP cards that have no resalability, high failure rates, and only 3 month warranty.
If they really cared about gamers and were really trying to help gamers, what they would have done was this:
CMP 3090 - $399
CMP 3080 - $299
CMP 3070 - $199
CMP 3060 - $169
CMP 1660S - $99
Now set those prices beside MSRP of RTX cards. What happens? All us miners go after the CMP cards. We would leave your GeForce cards alone. Supply begins to replenish. Prices drop. Gamers can now get RTX at a reasonable price. Miners have their CMP. Miners are happy. Gamers are happy. It looks good for NVidia because it would actually show that they cared about gamers, and now they've found a good use for their low quality chips which would have just been thrown out anyway. Win-win situation for everyone involved. But nope. Didn't do it. Instead, they decided to be greedy and selfish. They decided they wanted to take advantage of the shortage and the mining situation by LHRing their cards, pretending the LHR is ubhackable, then try and double charge miners for cards. Oops. Maybe should have followed through on that silly marketing campaign instead of being greedy and selfish. Trust me, a big company like NVidia. They love a big shortage like this, because it allows them to charge more too, not just eBay sellers. A big company like that, they don't care about you, they never did. It was all a big marketing ploy. They are only interested in their bottom line. They could have easily ended the shortage but chose not to. That's not us, that's them
Well if you have all the answers, you should just apply to Nvidia and share these with them. As I said, as someone who has worked in those very types of industries, its very easy for someone like you outside to come up with theories that in reality do not work at all.
What you conveniently ignore is
- Scalpers, and not just on the gaming cards, miners will be scalping eachother on these low priced CMP cards
- Miners will still buy the gaming GPUs and find away around the locks, as they did.
- Gamers will find a way to unlock the CMP GPUs and those will then undercut the sales of the gaming GPUs.
- Assuming you can even buy any of them.
You can keep trying to defend yourself trying to cash in on the crypto gold rush as if you're not doing anything to perpetuate the cycle of gamers being iced out of the ability to build a gaming system, but trust me this is not a hill you want to die on.