Good of Nvidia to split their product line in the future with one made for gamers and one for miners. That should help drive the price back down for the gaming crowd.
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.