News Galax Launches First GeForce RTX 3080, RTX 3070 With Ethereum Nerf

LolaGT

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Oct 31, 2020
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That is like buying new vette that won't go past 65 on the interstate.
I have never mined crypto anything ever, but I would never buy a hobbled card just because that grates against what is mine to do with as I please.
It isn't like I have to worry as I'd never buy a 3070 at $500 MSRP, let alone scalper price at NE nor anywhere else.
 

spongiemaster

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Dec 12, 2019
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That is like buying new vette that won't go past 65 on the interstate.
No, it isn't. It's comparable to Chevy cutting its towing capacity in half. The car was designed to be fun and entertaining and dropping the towing capacity has no effect on that. Gaming cards were designed to be fun and entertaining when gaming. Cutting the mining hash rates has no effect on that.
 
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mikewinddale

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I'm not sure this will actually bring down prices. There's still a limited amount of chip production capacity, and every individual mining-unlimited chip which is produced means one less LHR chip being produced. So supply is still restricted by production capacity, and demand is still being increased by mining. Splitting the cards into two product lines will not, by itself, affect either supply or demand for the silicon chips. Remember, at root, gamers and miners are both demanding the same chips from the same production line. The LHR is a small tweak that doesn't fundamentally affect the supply of what are otherwise identical chips.

It's like Ford taking a blue car and splitting it into two production lines: a blue car and a green car. That won't by itself affect supply in any meaningful sense. The two cars still compete for the same production capacity.

Miners will still be willing to pay inflated prices, and if chip production capacity is diverted from the LHR line to the mining-unlimited line to serve mining demand, then prices won't actually fall.

Now, it's possible that Nvidia will focus production on the LHR cards to reduce their price for gamers and free gamers from competing with miners. If Nvidia devotes more production capacity to LHR chips than mining-unlimited chips, then prices for gamers will fall and prices for miners will rise. But it's not clear why Nvidia would do this. Why sacrifice revenue from high-paying miners? Perhaps to retain the goodwill of gamers in the long-run, after the mining craze is over?

My guess is that this is just an attempt at price discrimination. Same way that the same chips are repackaged as low-end (xx30), middle (xx60) and high (xx70, 80, 90) at different price points. Different people have different willingnesses to pay. Artificially segmenting your product allows you to charge each person an amount that approaches their maximum willingness to pay.
 
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escksu

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Nay, its not going to make a difference. Eth is hitting USD4K, so as long as its profitable, pple will still snap up the cards. They will also find ways to bypass the limiter.

25MH/s is still enough to make close to USD100 a month after deducting power.
 

Blitz Hacker

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No, it isn't. It's comparable to Chevy cutting its towing capacity in half. The car was designed to be fun and entertaining and dropping the towing capacity has no effect on that. Gaming cards were designed to be fun and entertaining when gaming. Cutting the mining hash rates has no effect on that.
Yeah until you need to Tow a U-haul with it and can't because of some arbitrary limit. The issue with this is it's intentionally knee capping performance with no upside to it. You still won't be able to get one of these cards, and when you finally do .. What happens if gaming switches to NFT's and they're mined. And you just waited 2 years to buy an overpriced or scalped gpu to find out it can't do what the market is heading to.

The Crypto market is incentivized by billions of dollars annually (or more) to mine. There's no way they're going to make these cards unhackable, it's just an inconvenience for miners, and diminished/artificially limited gpu for gamers. And what about the gamers that want to throw on nicehash in their spare time to see what crypto mining is all about? Atleast when intel knee capped their own CPU sku's by multiplier locking, they cost less than the unlocked variants. This is just woke tech, that doesn't functionally do anything good aside from 'trying to stop crypto mining'.
What you do with your hardware should be your business.

If these companies actually cared even a little bit about gamers they would #1 stop selling bulk sales to corporate crypto mining operations, and #2 randomize sales like a newegg shuffle on their website. To my knowledge only Evga currently does this, and I've been on the wait list for 4+ months now with no card. :(