The GPU Sadness Index: Tracking eBay Pricing
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
You can also do this somewhat risk-free if you either first sell on ebay, before actually buying the computer, or if you sell on ebay within the return period of wherever you bought the computer.
That way if you don't find a buyer at the desired price, you're just back to square one, and not stuck with hardware you don't need.
I bought an art skateboard that had production problems (wont ship out to original buyers TBD) but it's already listed on ebay from scalpers.
Or is there some custom in the supply chain by which these firms waive that right for priority in sourcing? In which case, this sounds like an unethical buisness practice solely intended to create market inefficiencies...
Or is there something else to it?
There is a difference between unilateral refusal to sell, and selling on condition of non resale. As far as I am aware, the practice of conditional sale like that isn't actually backed by any legal teeth outside the realm of a contract. Once you buy the thing, it is yours. Now the contract could cover the primacy of sourcing, but not the item itself, which would have the same badic effect I suppose.
Believe it or not, "we just won't sell to them" is a surefire way to stir up trouble, because then people start asking pesky questions like "why?", and if the answer given isn't satisfactory, leads to going about and collecting data; turning it into a public interest sort of thing. There is no way that blacklisting sales without a darn good reason is ever a good thing.
Companies are free to negotiate terms (prices, delivery guarantees, priorities, etc.) for selling things how they like, generally. If it's in their best interest to not sell to someone, or to charge them higher rates / offer fewer discounts, that's what they'll do.
If we aren’t going to be able to buy GPUs I would at least prefer Nvidia make a profit instead of scalpers.
Right now there is a small chance to buy at MSRP. I managed to do it by calling around small stores in the area that didn't have a functioning online store - scalpers didn't bother with those..
If their prices aren't responding to supply/demand now, they weren't before either. The price of a NVidia GPU isn't set by market forces; never has been.
nVidia's customers are literally consumers.
“Treat like transactions” or “treat like cash flows” or “treat like wallets” would give me the pejorative meaning presumably intended.
Its the very definition of a consumer
Why is it so hard for businesses to just sell things? Why must they encroach? I'm not even a miner, but I'm not inviting anyone into my system to make a judgement call on whether my use of something I paid for is consistent with what they want. They sold it. They should not only have to part with the drivers, but with any semblance of software enforced binning too.
At least that’s the argument. We’ll see how it plays out.
I think there's a VAT penalty, but could it work??
I literally entered "computer store toronto" into Google and started calling every small one in the results. I found what I needed in fewer than 15 calls and picked it up an hour later.
And you can bet every other vendor is paying MSRP with possibly 0% markup, but shutting up about it unless they want 0 deliveries. Maybe even paying more than MSRP and expected to, on paper, treat it as a loss-leader.
That's a load of horseshit and anyone familiar with both PC gaming and cryptocurrency mining knows it.
Why would you divert chips that could be powering GeForce GPUs into mining cards and then also disabling the ability to mine on your gaming cards?
Unless, of course, you were scared shitless about an enormous secondary market forming for 3000 series cards when you release the GTX 4000 series... Why spend $699 for a GTX 4080 when you can buy a gently used GTX 3080 for $299-$399. Decent miners know you need to undervolt and underclock for maximum watt/hash performance - in other words, these chips weren't stressed intensively for months / years - they are the equivalent of a luxury car driven by a 70 year old Grandma to and from the grocery store and the department store.
I can guarantee you if NVIDIA had the capacity with Samsung to pump out a load of 3000 series cards, they'd do it, but they can't, so they're doing the next best thing - creating artificial scarcity.
Once these "mining cards" are no longer profitable, they have no secondary market. They go off to the landfill, or the e-waste processor.
This is about profit, pure and simple.
Because you're using parts with defects which are irrelevant to mining (e.g. faulty video output, texturing, etc).
There were many hacks in the past to revert these nerfs and get more functionality of higher end products for free. On one graphics card in the past, all you had to do was just flash the higher end card's bios, and it had a success rate of 75%
The current cryptomining chips are actually based on Turing (RTX 2000), not Ampere (RTX 3000).
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-repurposes-turing-s...
They want to preserve the long term revenue stream which is more important than what they may perceive is a short term demand spike.
What I don't understand is why gamers aren't petitioning their government to stop the trade tarrifs responsible for the price increases.
Gamers rise up /s
Anecdote: I actually got a 3060 for MSRP (well, MSRP + 6 euros with no separate charge for shipping). But the store was selling it as an "introductory offer while supplies last" and it sure isn't at MSRP anymore.
But if you're buying in a different country you don't have the tariffs I would assume.
I have been trying to get an Xbox Series X for months. I would like to have a new one, with a warranty. However, I finally gave up and "won" one with a $606 bid on stockx.com. After fees, shipping, etc, its close to $170 over the unrealistic $500 MSRP, which just shows how out of touch the MSRP really is.
For some reason, this combination of sentences confuses me. The scalpers determine the market price by buying almost the entire volume. The only way to beat scalpers is to raise prices beyond what people are willing to pay, which forces scalpers to charge more to turn a profit, further raising the total price.
I guess I don’t see how an initially higher price would stop scalpers at all, they’d just keep buying the entire stock, anyway.
No, this can't happen. If you raise prices beyond the market-clearing point, scalpers would need to charge prices higher than that -- and sell all their inventory -- in order to turn a profit. This can't be done; the higher prices prevent them from selling everything they bought.
> I guess I don’t see how an initially higher price would stop scalpers at all, they’d just keep buying the entire stock, anyway.
Again, this can't happen. Scalpers are not able to keep buying products they can't sell. You can only buy the entire stock if your revenue from selling the amount you can sell exceeds your cost of buying the entire stock. Exceeding your cost of buying the amount you can sell isn't enough.
Your economic model implies that all goods are controlled by scalpers who can never be dislodged. That's not even close to the truth. Why do you think that might be?
However, since there is actually more than 100k demand for GPUs there aren't enough GPUs for regular customers. Meaning that a large portion of consumers are actually getting ahold of GPUs which would make it impossible for market manipulators to buy the entire supply. You can't have both things at the same time. You can't be angry that stupid idiots get stuck on inventory because you aren't actually buying GPUs while at the same time being angry for there not being enough inventory because people are actually buying GPUs.
The reality is that people are buying GPUs and thus there is a lack of supply. Scalpers try to get ahold of the supply and auction it of fairly so that anyone who wants a GPU can get it since Nvidia failed to make sure that everyone who wants a GPU can get it.
>The only way to beat scalpers is to raise prices beyond what people are willing to pay, which forces scalpers to charge more to turn a profit, further raising the total price. I guess I don’t see how an initially higher price would stop scalpers at all, they’d just keep buying the entire stock, anyway.
As I said, if scalpers keep buying the supply while nobody wants the GPU they will simply be stuck with the excess stock and since they are in it to make money they will be forced to sell the GPU at market rates which is a net loss for them since they bought above market rate and a net gain to Nvidia. For the customer there is no difference.
One workaround would have been to set up a system where the additional profit from auctioned GPU's went to charities.
Also: Nvidia couldn't increase production quantity if they wanted, this isn't a money problem. The only way for them to produce more GPUs at this point is to build fabs, and that will take years. TSMC isn't going to break their contract with Apple regardless of how much money Nvidia shows up to the table with.
That is very short-term thinking; taking years is still eventually.
There's no planet on which they are going to base their future plans on crypto mining. End of story. The market is far too volatile for them to bet the company on it. Another couple million in the bank from auctioning off cards isn't going to change that. You're talking 10s of BILLIONS of dollars for fabs all to meet crypto mining demand? And oh, by the way, the faster they ramp up supply, the faster demand for the GPU goes down due to increased complexity of mining.
They have yield issues with the current generation chips. The only way that solves itself is through time, money won't improve the process, experience is the only fix.
You also failed to address what happens to all their retail partners who you've conveniently decided should be cut out.
There is a problem with this logic. If there is no money problem why haven't they expanded production ahead of time? Well, probably because there is no money in expanding production, so yes it's a money problem.
If it takes 5 years to build a fab and there is no reason to build a fab since there is no money to be made then why would you build a fab in any situation, even if you are willing to wait 5 years? The answer is you don't build the fab and accept that there will be a shortage in the future. Since there are not enough GPUs that's what you will have to live with instead of complaining that there aren't enough GPUs.
There will be a glut of graphics cards the likes of which has never been seen, once Ethereum is no longer mined.
As the PoS did actually launch and is actually working, I'm not sure it's going to be "never".
They may be late like so many software projects, but they seem to be serious about the switch to proof of stake.
Well as I understand I it was clear from day one that Ethereum would switch "one day" to PoS so miners knew, from the start, what they were in for.
> ... that invalidates millions of dollars of investment in mining Etherum...
Well the GPUs will not be able to mine ETH anymore but the ETH already mined aren't lost: the PoW chain is going to merged inside the PoS one.
I take it this all decided by the "Ethereum foundation"?
The mass mining farms don't give a shit about Ethereum. They literally mine whatever coin is most profitable to then be exchanged into Bitcoin. Everyone's going after BTC. There's a Bitcoin ATM in a service station convenience store near my house.
No one is going to give a shit when Ethereum moves to proof of stake, because they'll just switch to some other coin that still uses proof of work and thereby mines easily on their GPU farm and can then be exchanged for BTC.
This is exactly where I'd like to see it all go.
(This will in turn make some operations no longer economically viable, dropping GPU demand)
Computational capacity has become so much of a commodity, that gamers can't get it for their graphics, because they're being crowded out in the market by someone else (cryptocurrency miners) who can use it for something more profitable.
At least there's some originality there.
As far as how, there are dozens of things companies could do. Require a credit card verification, don’t allow digital credit cards, don’t ship to PO Boxes, don’t allow VOIP phone numbers, require an account with the retailer, do browser/machine fingerprinting, don’t allow purchasing on a VPN, scan the secondhand market for barcodes and ban people, require linking social media accounts and check for matches, don’t allow different billing and shipping addresses, require phone number verification, and on and on and on.
If retailers wanted to make sure it was one customer per video card, they could absolutely, trivially, do it.
But why would they? That’s a lot of commotion, and things people would probably get upset about. It will lead to less traffic on their site. And, at absolute best, they will get the exact same revenue.
I don't think that sort of relationship between manufacturers and libraries exists, though, and I'm not sure it should.
A year from now nvidia will have new GPUs and the 3000 series will be relatively easy to buy.
Good times.
(You would probably have to restrict the hardware to just hardware that's not useful for mining, e.g. monitors)
Maybe it could be restricted to physical goods sent to the same address as the card (which miners could still flip, but it's better than nothing)
Vega Frontier Editions (16 GB HBM2) are going for around $600-700 on eBay and Craigslist, also Facebook Marketplace in some areas.
Radeon VIIs (16 GB HBM2) are going for around $650-1000 on the same platforms.
You can easily put two of those into a machine and have a pretty impressive deep learning rig.
Here's the original article that reminded me of this. Its four years old, but I still feel its a worthwhile read: https://medium.com/intuitionmachine/building-a-50-teraflops-...
I turn my phone sideways and the video jumps to full screen (which I didn't request) and I hide the video and the graphs are half-cropped. I refresh in landscape and the graphs are still small. I click the graphs and they pop into modal view, still small.
I have to fuss with View Image to actually read them.
First, it doesn't change the fact that the amount of available silicon is limited. Instead of every card potentially becoming a gaming card now only a subset of them will, with the rest going exclusively to miners. How is that a good thing?
Second, it kills the second-hand market. Remember a few years back when used mining cards flooded the market and you could get a decent GPU dirt cheap? Yeah, NVidia didn't like that. Well, this won't happen anymore with those mining-only cards, since they're useless for anything other than mining. More e-waste, yaaay.
I first heard about using the p106-p90 cards on Windows with a modified driver via a LTT video [1]. I later read a blog post where someone claimed that the card was plug-and-play on Pop!_OS (a Linux distro) [2].
I think this is fairly well known at this point. I would be very curious to see how many were actually reused, though. I remember seeing a listing for a large number of p100 cards a few months ago, but I don't see any listings now. Were they scooped up and reused, or did the sellers give up and trash them?
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4
[2]https://ncrmnt.org/2019/08/04/linux-gaming-with-p106-100/ (search for "following up")
No, not at all. Any references?
Because I sure do... I should have bought two. Now you can sell one - today, right now - for $700-800. I haven't seen an auction with a final bid less than $650, and I've been watching. Most "Buy It Now" options are $700-800, and aren't having all that much trouble selling.
We're talking two generations old cards, released almost four years ago, that are selling for what brand new GTX 3080s are supposed to MSRP at.
That's slightly above half of its retail price (when it was new) and roughly in the same ballpark as RTX 2070 MSRP. Is this really "dirt cheap"? Do you expect video cards to never depreciate then?
More to the point, I don't remember the market being saturated with used video cards in way that could put a dent in retail prices. They always seem to sell at comparable performance/$ ratio to new cards. I'm genuinely curious if I missed any trends.
Yes, you genuinely missed the trend. When BTC prices cratered awhile back, a lot of miners starting dumping their cards because they couldn't even break even on power consumption / mining costs.
eBay was flooded with cards.
Mining cards look to be Turing and 12nm. This should resolve concerns that it will affect 3000 series(Ampere) availability. People will still hate on Nvidia tho because why not...
What makes a card good at gaming (floating point operations per second) makes it good at mining, and vice versa. If the price/performance of the gaming variant is more favorable than the mining variant, why would any miner not buy the gaming one? They'll also have better resale value.
Real world equivalent: if Toyota made a special car for dog owners that costs 10% less but is useless for anything else, why would the dog owners bother with it?
Nvidia is trying to limit the hashing rate of the gaming variant, but it won't take long before someone figures out a way around it. There are billions at stake here. Also, the limitations only affect Ethereum hash rate, altcoin mining is untouched.
GPU mining is just 10% slower than the theoretical memory-bound maximum (if compute was infinitely fast) - https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memor...
A more interesting thing for mining would be to hook up a (relatively) cheap ASIC, with cheaper voltage regulation, to the same high-bandwidth GDDR6X memory.
All of this seems so strange.
By the way, doesn't Tesla use GPU cards in their cars for the autopilot functionality?
It doesn't make sense to use off-the-shelf graphics cards. They're not designed for the environment of cars, and aren't made to have that reliability. The medium older Tesla Autopilot uses Nvidia platform meant for self-driving. The newer Autopilot uses Tesla-designed SoCs that have fancy neural network accelerators.
Everything important in cars needs to be high-reliability. Between that, the form factor, added redundant cost, and the reduced integration of having a separate PCIe card instead of something integrated in an SoC, it doesn't make sense to use a graphics card.
So no, the claim that Elon is somehow responsible for the scaling/shortage of Nvidia gaming cards does not seem to hold up.
I dont even understand why the claim that Tesla uses off the shelf parts even matters when its simply verifiable either way.