NVIDIA To Release A Cypto-Mining Card Based on The GP102-100 GPU

[Janus67]

This sounds good in theory, but from a miners perspective (just one card nowadays) I don't see much reason for a miner to buy one of these instead of a normal gaming card unless it is a fraction of the cost. Part of the benefit of buying a gaming card is the secondary market. If the mining cards are no longer profitable no one will want them and they will get trashed (look at old asic miners). Versus I'm sure people are running 7950s/70s/280x/290x etc series cards (and the nvidia equivalent) that were used for mining, and the person that mined with them either was able to still game with their cards or made back some amount of their initial purchase cost.

 

[Alaric]

This sounds good in theory, but from a miners perspective (just one card nowadays) I don't see much reason for a miner to buy one of these instead of a normal gaming card unless it is a fraction of the cost. Part of the benefit of buying a gaming card is the secondary market. If the mining cards are no longer profitable no one will want them and they will get trashed (look at old asic miners). Versus I'm sure people are running 7950s/70s/280x/290x etc series cards (and the nvidia equivalent) that were used for mining, and the person that mined with them either was able to still game with their cards or made back some amount of their initial purchase cost.

It's embarrassing, but that hadn't even occurred to me. Right over my head. If people are selling off mining only cards when the market inevitably dips, who's going to buy them? That's an astute observation, and one potentially missed by Nvidia.

 

[mackerel]

Thought we had gong over it before. GPUs will still have compute use cases. It wont be top dollar, but it wont be zero dollar either. In part it might need modification the other way, away from mining optimisation of bios to something more general.

 

[Lochekey]

I wonder how these second hand cards would do for folding@home or some other similar task.

 

[MaddMutt]

Find now that being said to bad we can't modify our own bios's to make it work like this card above. Stock speeds hitting 47.... man my 1080ti did around 32 stock and got close to 40 when OCed. Just goes to show you its all about the memory timings and Nvidia cards that are built for gaming probably have very loose timings because speed helps more and gives wider range of memory to use for a cheaper price.

^IIRC the OLD Nvidia Geforce gaming cards ($500.00 or less) could be turned into Workstation cards ($1500.00 or more) with just a BIOS flash. IIRC Nvidia used the same GPU for both cards but crippled the Geforce card (Though the BIOS) when used in a Workstation. As-long as you made sure that the gaming card also had a Workstation card and you knew the exact model, you could have a $2500.00 GPU Believe IT or NOT BUT (Back in the OLD Nvidia days) IIRC Nvidia used to require for SLI to work both CARDS had to have: GPU's from the same Manufacturer, the same BIOS Version, AND the same Memory Manufacturer, Size, and Width,

 

[deathman20]

^IIRC the OLD Nvidia Geforce gaming cards ($500.00 or less) could be turned into Workstation cards ($1500.00 or more) with just a BIOS flash. IIRC Nvidia used the same GPU for both cards but crippled the Geforce card (Though the BIOS) when used in a Workstation. As-long as you made sure that the gaming card also had a Workstation card and you knew the exact model, you could have a $2500.00 GPU Believe IT or NOT BUT (Back in the OLD Nvidia days) IIRC Nvidia used to require for SLI to work both CARDS had to have: GPU's from the same Manufacturer, the same BIOS Version, AND the same Memory Manufacturer, Size, and Width,

While I know that worked with really old cards I don't think it works with newer ones. AMD cards well ATI back in the day didn't even need a bios flash. Just a modification to a few driver files did the trick to have your cards ID show up.