Has anyone tried to buy a graphics card recently? Mine seems to be close to dying, so I was looking around for one; it is pretty close to impossible. The local guy I deal with said it is largely due to bitcoin mining, and that bitcoin miners have bought them all up. He also said that on the next generation of graphics cards they are going to try and make it so they can’t mine bitcoin. Has anyone heard about this?
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"Nvidia is purposefully making its new RTX 3060 graphics cards less efficient to mine Ethereum cryptocurrency. New drivers that will accompany the release of the GPUs later this month will reduce the hash rate of Ethereum mining by around 50 percent, using software detection for cryptocurrency mining. "
I believe it should be up to the consumer how they like to use the product as long as it’s legal. Don’t like the way Nvidia is doing this.
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Seems like they’re missing a market niche for a product that mines better for crypto mining.
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Good point. It would be a good idea to have a card specially made for miners, and then cards for gamers … Everyone is happy!!
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It hasn’t been useful or profitable to mine Bitcoin with a graphics card since around 2015, maybe earlier. (In fact, definitely earlier, since FPGA mining was being done at least as early as 2013.) Bitcoin mining is done with purpose-designed ASICs.
Go blame those Ethereum bastards instead.
They are protecting their original customers. They also plan on producing GPUs specifically for mining – just like they already do for high-end CAD workstations. They will probably charge the miners 2X or 3X or 10X as much as they’re charging gamers, just like they do for the tiny almost meaningless firmware changes for the “CAD” cards.
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Yeah, agree. And I strongly doubt anyone will be affected much by a pure “software detection”. If it’s a driver only thing, trying to detect mining software, then it’ll be circumvented in no time. Only thing I could imagine would work would be the GPU itself checking what kind of shaders are used - trying to differentiate if it’s computing or graphics. But that would also most likely block other applications than mining.
I was in Guanghua yesterday, graphics cards are available for sure. Maybe not the most recent and most interesting ones.
Apart from that, if anyone needs a 2nd hand GTX 1060 3GB: I’d be willing to part with one. In my experience fast enough to play even many modern games., just doesn’t cut it for very some games that require lots of graphics memory.
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How much is the GTX1060? I have a GTX 1050 2G, its ok but struggles a bit…
I’m looking to offload my brand new Radeon 5700XT 8gb, if anyone is interested…
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The problem is, miners don’t buy hardware.
A GPU purchase is likely to accompany CPU, motherboard, etc…
Miners instead buy less hardware per GPU.
This hurts and upsets stores.
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Ill make a for sale post later, after I check that I remembered the type correctly ^^
Yea you know those guanhua stores makes about 50nt profit on the sale of say a GTX3070. Not kidding. Used to work for one of those stores and they really want to sell entire systems with mouse, keyboard, case, power supply, etc. which have much higher margin (as much as 300%), so the store can make a decent profit selling entire systems. That means they hate customers who comes in and only buys GPU because this is a sale of over 20,000 but with 50nt profit. Quite frankly I have no idea how any of these stores stay in business.
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Repair.
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Really? how do they make money charging 100nt to reformat your hard drive and reinstall windows (takes several hours)?
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Don’t have to focus on it. If an employee is watching a computer for one hour then they’re wasting money and should be fired.
I could get five, ten going at the same time.
And repairs are not $100. 
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I just don’t really believe that shops only make 50nt selling GPU’s. It wouldn’t even cover the carrying cost and depreciation. So there’s probably more to it than them making only 50nt selling GPU or CPU’s. Because no shop would dedicate a huge portion of their store and storage space for something they make less than .1% profit on.
Costco have loss leaders but they also don’t dedicate half the store on them either.
You mean TLs info may not be correct ?
I’m shocked !
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They are going to make a card specifically for mining to offset. And BTW, Elon is going to try building-in some stuff for mining in his solar arrays and power walls, cars.
What gets me is that there are only so many bitcoin left in the wild.
The intention was to cut out middle men taking their cuts from financial transactions.
When all bitcoin has been “minted” (mining is really a misnomer), the bitcoin liberators become the new overlords, as they can then simply charge for the service of computing the blockchain ledger for all of us peons.
Should bitcoin go bust, or get forced back into only fringe usage, Nvidia would not benefit from having been abandoned by the gaming industry for a more reliable partner.
*it has been about 3 years since I put any serious study into btc, so go easy on my outsider’s perspective
Seriously, what is the value of a coin that is backed by nothing more than an algorithm? I guess anything that the average idiot wants to pay for it hoping that the next idiot wants to pay more.
Not much, one speculation regarding [edit: the seed of] the 2017 spike was illicit money escaping China. It’s great for people who don’t want exposure related to the exchange. It’s not all bad.
Block chain, however, may save civilization