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GPU Prices Soar as Bitcoin Miners Buy Up Hardware To Build Rigs (computerworld.com)
"Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency miners have created a dearth of mid-range and high-end GPU cards that are selling for twice as much as suggested retail," reports Computerworld. "The reason: miners are setting up server farms with the cards."
Lucas123 writes: GPU prices have more than doubled in some cases... Some of the most popular GPUs can't even be found anymore as they've sold out due to demand. Meanwhile, some retailers are pushing back against bitcoin miners by showing favoritism to their traditional gamer customers, allowing them to purchase GPUs at manufacturer's suggested retail price. Earlier this year, NVIDIA asked retailers of its hardware to prioritize sales to gamers over cryptocurrency miners.
1) Bitcoin is NOT mined on GPU, since like 5 years. Only on special ASIC devices. You ment to write that crypto-currencies, ALTcoins, are GPU mined
2) This is going on for like 1-2 years now, including the GPU shortage as result of ALT-coin mining
Check the nVidia roadmap, this is exactly what they're working on this year.
This has been known for a while. Post some stuff that isn't stale bread.
They won't buy them cuz then they'd have zero resale value after the card is no longer powerful enough to mine. Selling used cards to gamers gets at least a few bucks back.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
literally anyone who would care about this phenomenon already knows about it. In fact, aren't prices coming back down now that the hype has subsided?
Hothardware reports that pricing is now on a downward trend, with GPU prices approaching MSRP. They suggest that this is at least in part due to a new Ethereum ASIC miner. And they provide citations to show that the prices are actually falling, while computerworld simply makes a claim with no evidence...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Welcome to 2016. What moron posted this article. GPU prices are dropping not soaring, Bitcoin hasn't been mined on GPU's for years now, alt coin mining since the price crashes has led to nice drops in GPU prices
There'd probably be some benefit to a mining only card. The lack of ports for connecting to displays would make the cards less expensive and companies could bin chips that have defects only in the parts of the chip that would make them useless for gaming but don't affect their ability to mine. Also, I don't believe that the used market is that valuable as it's likely to get flooded as miners try to upgrade at the same time and many consumers are leery about buying cards used for mining to begin with.
Ethereum's hash function is designed to use a lot of memory bandwidth, whereas the Bitcoin hash function is primarily just arithmetic. That means that an ASIC can pop down tons of dedicated hardware for the Bitcoin hash function and be much, much more power-efficient than a CPU or GPU. An Ethereum ASIC does not have the same relative efficiency gain -- but it does have some.
For any proof-of-work scheme, there will be some point where an ASIC will be more profitable than a CPU or GPU, but most (that use novel hash functions) don't reach that point because the one-time costs of designing the ASIC are so high. Antminer apparently thinks Ethereum has reached that point -- which may push it towards adopting proof-of-stake sooner.
They won't buy them cuz then they'd have zero resale value after the card is no longer powerful enough to mine. Selling used cards to gamers gets at least a few bucks back.
I seriously don't want a graphics card that has been abused in a mining rig. They aren't meant to run full power 24/7, and I doubt there's more than a couple of use in them.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
Unless they are getting free power they're a lot more likely to slightly undervolt the cards, as running at 70-80% uses 50% less power than trying to max things out.