Nvidia's solution? Give miners their own GPUs

[dfonda]

This is good news, Nvidia is going to limit the mining capabilities of the the RTX's and give miners their own GPU's...

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-announces-cryptocurrency-mining-processor-gpu-line

Except that miners can still use gamers cards for mining , but gamers will not be able to use mining GPU's

So it's Good News , Bad News....

 

[BugFreak]

I imagine it won't take long for the miners to figure out a way to get around this. Hopefully not though.

 

[Janus67]

It's going to be driver-based and only on the 3600 cards apparently.

I fully imagine to see a hacked driver or whatever shortly after the release.

 

[stompah]

Buy a 3060 mining card for $300 or a 3060Ti that can mine and game for $400 then be sold to a gamer.

Nvidia did this in the past. Not a big deal when it looked like you could mine for many years. But, with ETH looking like it won't be minable in a few months to a few years people will be snatching up 3060Tis.

 

[Woomack]

I have a promo on electricity and have it free for a month so I'm mining now but probably won't in a month. I actually sold Vega56 in the last days for 100% more than I paid for it 1.5 years ago ... around $630 (here we have 23% VAT so prices look a bit different). I also purchased 1x 3070 (went to my brother's PC) and 2x 6800XT in the last 3 months (had to sell a lot of stuff to cover that).
The first 6800XT cost me ~$1100, the second one ~$1300 (still that 23% VAT) while EU stores sell them for ~$1600+. RTX3070 cost me ~$750 while now there is no store selling them for less than ~$1100. I guess that even overpriced but I'm somehow satisfied ... going back to the start of this post, and a short summary ... I sold a used Vega56 without warranty for ~$630, and the new ASUS RTX3070 TUF cost me ~$750.

 

[Kenrou]

 

[Woomack]

They all care only about their profits. RTX3060 already went to miners about 2-3 weeks ago. As I remember, it was Gigabyte who sold it in higher quantities to bigger miners. Here is another news about Gigabyte RTX3060 but this time sold via some store - https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-...cards-already-available-on-second-hand-market.
RTX3060 results in mining are around the web for a couple of days too.

Good luck to all gamers who were counting on a cheaper gaming graphics card. These "low" series are expected to be for ~$1k, at least in EU stores ... as long as miners won't buy them out before others. With each week I feel a bit better with a purchase of my two RX6800XT.

 

[Blaylock]

Neither Nvidia nor AMD can keep up with production runs, why do they think adding another card in the mix is going to help with anything? This is really just a PR move to try and fool the gaming community into believing Nvidia is on their side. This will only make the 3000 series gaming cards harder to acquire.

 

[Woomack]

At least they are delivering some cards, try to but RX 6800/XT Still, most stores have like 1:300 ratio between sold Radeon 6000 series and Nvidia 3000 series. AMD promised wide availability of their cards after the premiere and is significantly worse than with RTX3000. Count also that most miners buy Nvidia, not AMD.
For sure I agree that adding new cards isn't helping when they have problems with production. Soon we will see RX6700/XT and again it won't change anything.

 

[EarthDog]

These don't seem like 'another card'. They are existing cards/silicon that are simply locked down. The hope is for miners to pick the neutered gaming cards (at a lesser price) and let the full fledged cards game (with a premium price point). Since miners look for the quickest ROI, it seems to behoove them to buy mining cards and leave the gaming cards alone... at least, that is the thought on how it works.

 

[Blaylock]

In the current state, miners are/will buy whatever card is available so long as it is profitable to do so. I think under normal circumstances this is a great idea, for both gamers and miners alike. But with the supply issue from AMD and NVidia, this will help no one.

Just my 2¢.

 

[EarthDog]

Right. So why wouldn't they want to buy a cheaper card with 100% potential (hash rate) than a more expensive card that has neutered performance (hash rate)?

This process would have been a lot better had it been implemented out of the gate... but as supply increases, making each beneficial to the user (mining card and gaming) should help separate the two buying markets.

 

[Blaylock]

I honestly don't think it would have helped even if it was adopted early simply because of the lack of supply.

 

[EarthDog]

...as I inferred above, miners likely wouldn't buy cards that cost a lot more and perform way worse leaving more for gamers. Now, this clearly depends on allocation as well. Is it 60/40 gaming cards/mining cards? Who knows. It feels obvious to me that, initially, miners are going to buy the cheaper and more performant cards..........when available.

I don't mine these days, but I also don't see the point of buying a card for a lot more money that has half the hash rate. That situation makes other cards a lot more valuable. I think almost regardless of stock, that this effort is a positive move to thwart miners purchasing cards.

Edit: even at launch, do you think miners would have bought full fledged cards? I dont...at least not until after they are sold out... and even then you need to think about the ROI of a more expensive card with half the hash rate? You'd literally lose money on that purchase.

 

[Janus67]

I think a major distinction here is that the dedicated mining cards have virtually no resale value. A pre-mined geforce card has a huge resale market to those that are willing to buy one. Consider the majority of larger mining operations (or anyone that does the research) tweaks the cards to run cooler, undervolted, etc so that it isn't like you're running prime95 at hugely overvolted/overclocked settings.

Has a price/performance been named for the new crypto cards? Otherwise, miners will continue to buy 3060ti+ cards as available.

 

[stompah]

I think a major distinction here is that the dedicated mining cards have virtually no resale value. A pre-mined geforce card has a huge resale market to those that are willing to buy one. Consider the majority of larger mining operations (or anyone that does the research) tweaks the cards to run cooler, undervolted, etc so that it isn't like you're running prime95 at hugely overvolted/overclocked settings.

Has a price/performance been named for the new crypto cards? Otherwise, miners will continue to buy 3060ti+ cards as available.

I typed out a similar reply but got busy and didn;t complete my thoughts.

This isn't Nvidia's first foray into mining cards. P104 and P106. When they got to end of life they were selling for around $50-100.

LTT did a video on them.

As a garage miner I won't buy those cards because the investment savings isn't great enough to overcome the lack of resale value. Also eventually I will hit a power limit. Meaning I cannot safely run more cards due to electricity limitations. So, I'd rather spend a little bit more per card and recoup that money and then some at time or resale.

Huge GPU mining farms in China will likely gobble these up. BUT, I doubt that will slow their purchase of GPU mining cards. It will probably bust give them chances to mine. I know if I had a warehouse, fat current capability and deep pockets I would fill that warehouse to the brim with whatever turned a profit.


Currently there is a shortage of silicon across multiple industries. There won't be enough 3060/3060Ti/3070/3080/3090 chips made to relieve us for a while.

 

[Woomack]

I would exclude RTX3090 from the list as they are collecting dust in stores because of the ridiculous price. At least in Poland, you can buy them without issues in all larger stores.
The most interesting for miners are RTX3060Ti. I was thinking about 1-2 cards when they were "cheap" and widely available (at least in Poland) but I thought it's not worth it. Now prices are 50% higher and can't even get these cards. I decided to go AMD way because fewer people jump on them in stores and there are much better prices for RX6800/6900XT if we compare their performance to Nvidia.

I heard that the RTX3060 lock has been hacked already but haven't seen any confirmation.

 

[mackerel]

I would exclude RTX3090 from the list as they are collecting dust in stores because of the ridiculous price. At least in Poland, you can buy them without issues in all larger stores.

I find regional variations interesting. Been looking on and off since they came out. In UK, 3090s had been going in and out of stock up to about early January, but after that I haven't seen a single one listed in major stores. Someone is buying them even at their retail price. Maybe because scalper 3080s are pretty much up there anyway. A quick look on ebay does show 3080s selling for about what I had seen 3090s listed at stores. Insanity.

I see others posting on here (mostly US?) saying they got 30 cards but no such luck for me in the UK, until today. On my random check of a web store this morning I saw two different 3070s in stock. In the time it took me to open the product pages one sold out so that made my mind up for me, I get the remaining one or not. So that's now shipped and arriving tomorrow. It'll be put to gaming, even ordered a new HDMI cable to ensure it'll work at 4k120 as my existing ones are only certified to 60. Next I should decide what GPU to move where and/or if I should sell an older one.

 

[Blaylock]

It seems only the Nvidia 90HX Mining GPU will affect stock. The 30HX, 40HX, & 50HX CMP cards will all feature Turing Processors and the 90HX will feature the current Ampere Proc.

Sauce

 

[Kenrou]

https://www.techpowerup.com/280017/...ti-mining-feature-bypassed-by-hdmi-dummy-plug

"A user from Quasar Zone forums has managed to bypass the restriction by simply installing a dummy HDMI plug. By using the dummy plug, the card thinks that it is connected to a monitor and thus runs normally. Using this workaround, the user was able to set-up a four-way GeForce RTX 3060 mining rig with 48 MH/s hashing power per GPU, for the total 192 MH/s hash rate."