Analyst: buying a high-end graphics card for mining would be "very foolish"

[Bobbydpue]

Sales have dropped based on what numbers?

 

[terzaerian]

Sales have dropped based on what numbers?

THE F'ING OP.

It’s a different story when looking solely at dedicated graphics cards. The market decreased 3.9% from the last quarter, with Nvidia taking an 82% share, dwarfing AMD’s 18% share. JPR says the fourth quarter is typically flat compared to Q3, so this is normal.

 

[Cycloid Torus]

So, I guess what we are saying is that, due to:

- smart miners withdrawing strong pursuit of GPUs (coming fork)
- improved business supply and activity as vaccines reduce COVID issues
- likelihood that tariffs may be reduced
- scalpers realizing that they have overpriced 'out of the market'
- new versions of cards coming on to the market

that prices are too high and there will be a significant drop in prices above MSRP coming.

 

[toooooot]

People who build these famrs not just farm. They sell those video cards when it is not profitable to mine anymore. Not only they mined enough to cover the cost of the video cards, they sold those cards for 200 300 500 dollars each.
And there were many who gladly upgraded.
They wouldnt do it if it was not profitable.

 

[StrikerRocket]

Looking forward 4 the crypto crash and all that tasty tears

And possibly the bargain used GPUs... ;-)

 

[StrikerRocket]

People who build these famrs not just farm. They sell those video cards when it is not profitable to mine anymore. Not only they mined enough to cover the cost of the video cards, they sold those cards for 200 300 500 dollars each.
And there were many who gladly upgraded.
They wouldnt do it if it was not profitable.

Yes, when the situation is "normal"... which is not the case at the moment...
Personnally, I will *not* buy an overpriced GPU, though I have upgraded *all* my PC components (3900X, MSI X570 Tomahawk Wifi, MSI MAG274QRF-QD monitor, etc.) If I have to wait, say, one more year to upgrade my GTX 1080, then, so be it. I'll have enough power to finish all the games I haven't finished with the 1080. I will not create/be part of a market for scalpers or greedy corporations.

 

[Bobbydpue]

THE F'ING OP.

"The market " is not sales numbers. Stop being so aggressive for no reason.

 

[Bobbydpue]

You're ignoring point I made to deny what looks like the biggest lie in tech in a long time. Sales have dropped, not sky rocketed.

I previously said:
"Also there is no way to know if the capacity they bought is what they are getting during a pandemic "

 

[Bobbydpue]

I previously said:
"Also there is no way to know if the capacity they bought is what they are getting during a pandemic "

Without actual numbers is difficult to form any opinions with any amount of accuracy. We still don't know where the bottleneck is if there is one. Is manufacturing constrained, and if so, why?

 

[mattferg]

True: Let's not forget that even Nvidia switched to Samsung for fabs at least on the initial runs, only thing AMD and Nvidia could have done was predict this would happen when Apple decided to leave intel behind but even then I am almost sure they did not have enough notice to suddenly ramp up their space on TSMC or seek alternatives, Nvidia did react but barely and there were not without some issues by going with Samsung.

What's really laughably bad is just the PR people from AMD, as usual decided to start throwing rocks through their glass house. The only other lesson for AMD is more engineers or at least more of their input when it comes to marketing and PR stunts.

They’re not competing with Apple for fab space, Apple is on a different node. AMD actually got a tonne more fab space this year as they were given most of Apple’s old allocation.

 

[Gastec]

A famous countryman of mine says it's our moral duty to take advantage of fools and part them with their money. I'm not doing it, not because of morality but because I don't yet have the "investment" capital or the courage to speculate and take advantage of fools. But I would if I had a few tens or hundreds of thousands of...fiat currency lying around, just gathering dust.

 

[Gastec]

Disclaimer: I know very little about this whole Ethereum deal about this "fork to version 2.0" stuff but I've been seeing it for a while now. Not sure what "very soon" means: could be weeks, could be end of the year, could just not happen.

So it seems to me that the ROI for a mining GPU to be still "worth it" to miners depends entirely on EXACTLY WHEN this changes happen to measure that up against power usage costs which we know also varies a lot.

So saying is a "bad idea" is based on...What exactly? The "very soon" change that hasn't been clearly defined? The power costs that also are so variable as to render the entire statement meaningless if one can save enough on power?

Well, if you produce your own electricity, steal it, or never pay for it/have the general population pay for it with help from the government, then why not "mine" with all the GPU's you can get your dirty, greedy hands on?
When it doesn't become profitable anymore you list the GPU's for sale online, accompanied by pretty, colored pictures and texts like "As new!" "Barely used, low mileage, always rested in the garage"

 

[Gastec]

A friend of mine built a mining rig in 2017 and continued to mine even after the value of crypto fell away at the time. He continued building up a balance and just last month he sold up and has enough money from it to be able to put a deposit on a house. So whilst it may not be immediately profitable to mine at today’s rates, you just need to wait for the value of the crypto you are holding goes back up again.

However if Eth becomes obsolete on GPUs then yes buying now to mine wouldn’t be a very good idea. Unless there’s another coin, I don’t know enough.

What do you mean he "has enough money from it"? I thought the idea was that the "crypto", or whatever they call them, ARE the money? Not just colored beads to sell to the primitives. He surely must have payed for his house directly with Ethereum, right?

 

[terzaerian]

What do you mean he "has enough money from it"? Aren't the "crypto", or whatever they call them, the money? He surely must have payed for his house directly with Ethereum?

You can use crypto on NewEgg. 2010 is calling, it wants its tired, worn-out talking points back.

"The market " is not sales numbers. Stop being so aggressive for no reason.

I return the aggression I receive with interest.

 

[Gastec]

Same. They're great opportunities to buy and offload worthless fiat. Buying has a better ROI than mining to boot, which is why I only mine casually with the GPU I already have... and buy shares in Nvidia and AMD, the folks selling the shovels.


So the news is finally catching up to what I've been saying for months. Great job

To also offer some technical corrections: this is less a fork to Eth 2.0 as the merging of an experimental fork (the proof of stake Beacon chain) into the main proof-of-work Ethereum chain. There will be other mineable coins out there but none of them are anywhere near Eth right now.

"Worthless fiat"? Do you buy your bread and eggs with cryptocoins?

 

[Gastec]

You can use crypto on NewEgg. 2010 is calling, it wants its tired, worn-out talking points back.

Newegg....so I should buy my eggs from this American online retailer?

 

[terzaerian]

Newegg....so I should buy my eggs from this American online retailer?

It literally doesn't matter who is shown to accept crypto, you people will keep moving the goalposts. Meanwhile the fiat you blindly put your trust in is robbing you blind.

Funny how it looks like the inverse of the BTC graph.

 

[Gastec]

LOL Ethereum is just one coin of the many that are profitably... As for the 2.0 version of it might take about a year or so.... Mining will still be around for a bit longer boys. Happy with my 6 GPU 3070 mining rig bringing in $1k-1200k a month and only costing me $40 in power.

Sure you do mate, you are making thousands of worthless (as username terzaerian says) US dollars per month just by consuming electricity.

 

[Gastec]

It literally doesn't matter who is shown to accept crypto, you people will keep moving the goalposts. Meanwhile the fiat you blindly put your trust in is robbing you blind.

Funny how it looks like the inverse of the BTC graph.

My national currency is not the US dollar but what am I supposed to understand from that picture and graph?

 

[Shadowboxer]

What do you mean he "has enough money from it"? I thought the idea was that the "crypto", or whatever they call them, ARE the money? Not just colored beads to sell to the primitives. He surely must have payed for his house directly with Ethereum, right?

I think he traded eth for btc and then sold the btc when it hit like £50K or whatever. I will ask him next time. I know right now he’s selling off all the old cards to buy appliances for his new house!

 

[Avro Arrow]

You're ignoring point I made to deny what looks like the biggest lie in tech in a long time. Sales have dropped, not sky rocketed.

I must disagree with you and the reason is that I remember 2017 very clearly. It was exactly the same as now (sans the pandemic) when it came to video cards.

Something as pedestrian as an RX 580 was close to $600CAD (when you could even get one) and ALL Radeon cards were sold out almost all the time. The only reason that they weren't sold out constantly was that the Polaris yields were just fantastic. It was well-known that GCN-based Radeons mined better than GeForce cards at the same price points and ATi Polaris had the best cost/efficiency/hash rate combination on the market at the time.

If you wanted a Radeon card or a high-end GeForce card, you either paid dearly for it or didn't get it. It's because of the fact that if you wanted a card of ANY kind, you were either going to pay through the nose or get a GTX 1060. The GTX 1060's price was higher than MSRP but not insanely so because there was no demand for it from miners which is why everyone and their mother bought one. This is why the GTX 1060 has dominated the Steam surveys for so long.

I myself was suffering a bit because my two HD 7970s became one HD 7970 as support for Crossfire waned. I was just stupidly lucky to be browsing Newegg.ca one evening and for some reason they suddenly had the Sapphire Radeon R9 Fury Nitro+ on for ONLY $325CAD. I couldn't understand where they came from nor did I understand at the time why they were so cheap (and nor did I care).

I realised later on that the 275W TDP made them rather unsuitable for mining but my PSU is 1kW so after searching online for any information about what could be wrong with them and finding nothing, I pulled the trigger. It's one of the best deals on a video card that I've ever found. Greg Salazar was so impressed with it that he posted a video about it urging people to buy it, calling it a no-brainer:

I've been buying video cards since the 90s and I had never seen anything like what I saw in 2017....until now. The one common factor between then and now is miners buying clearing out video cards by the hundreds and you're trying to say that it ISN'T the reason they're sold out everywhere?

Yeah, ok there buddy. I'm not buying that bridge.

 

[Cycloid Torus]

@Avro Arrow That is where I get bogged down. We think there may be hundreds of miners buying hundreds of cards - so there should be higher sales... but are there? I would really like the source for a sales statistic - especially as I would like to monitor it for the inevitable decline.

 

[duckofdeath]

I must disagree with you and the reason is that I remember 2017 very clearly. It was exactly the same as now (sans the pandemic) when it came to video cards.

Something as pedestrian as an RX 580 was close to $600CAD (when you could even get one) and ALL Radeon cards were sold out almost all the time. The only reason that they weren't sold out constantly was that the Polaris yields were just fantastic. It was well-known that GCN-based Radeons mined better than GeForce cards at the same price points and ATi Polaris had the best cost/efficiency/hash rate combination on the market at the time.

If you wanted a Radeon card or a high-end GeForce card, you either paid dearly for it or didn't get it. It's because of the fact that if you wanted a card of ANY kind, you were either going to pay through the nose or get a GTX 1060. The GTX 1060's price was higher than MSRP but not insanely so because there was no demand for it from miners which is why everyone and their mother bought one. This is why the GTX 1060 has dominated the Steam surveys for so long.

I myself was suffering a bit because my two HD 7970s became one HD 7970 as support for Crossfire waned. I was just stupidly lucky to be browsing Newegg.ca one evening and for some reason they suddenly had the Sapphire Radeon R9 Fury Nitro+ on for ONLY $325CAD. I couldn't understand where they came from nor did I understand at the time why they were so cheap (and nor did I care).

I realised later on that the 275W TDP made them rather unsuitable for mining but my PSU is 1kW so after searching online for any information about what could be wrong with them and finding nothing, I pulled the trigger. It's one of the best deals on a video card that I've ever found. Greg Salazar was so impressed with it that he posted a video about it urging people to buy it, calling it a no-brainer:

I've been buying video cards since the 90s and I had never seen anything like what I saw in 2017....until now. The one common factor between then and now is miners buying clearing out video cards by the hundreds and you're trying to say that it ISN'T the reason they're sold out everywhere?

Yeah, ok there buddy. I'm not buying that bridge.

Half truths are great! That time the mining craze was real and it only affected AMD cards. Today you can't buy any card anywhere, and they sell for nearly 3,000 bucks on ebay. It's not the same.

 

[Avro Arrow]

@Avro Arrow That is where I get bogged down. We think there may be hundreds of miners buying hundreds of cards - so there should be higher sales... but are there? I would really like the source for a sales statistic - especially as I would like to monitor it for the inevitable decline.

Unfortunately, sales numbers are confidential and we'll never see them. There's also the fact that even if we could, they wouldn't necessarily translate into the information that you seek because there's several GPUs being made by two corporations and sales numbers doesn't take into account defective RMAs (which are handled by the AIB partners but result in another GPU being sold as a replacement). Another point is, does AMD consider the sale of an APU as a separate thing or does it consider it the sale of one AMD CPU and one ATi GPU? It would be a convoluted mess that would be difficult to make sense of in the first place and almost impossible to make predictions based on it.

The easiest way to know the correlation is to follow the value of the cryptocurrencies themselves and compare them to the relative availability of the cards at the same point in time. If the value of the currencies falls and the availability of the cards spikes concurrently, then you'll have your answer.

I wish that there were a better way but I can't think of any.

 

[Gastec]

The selling of overpriced graphics cards (often without any guarantee) on Ebay and other shady online places is also part of the pyramid scheme of cryptocurrecies.