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Comment by kouteiheika | Hacker News Reader

It's actually not. It's just yet another anti-consumer tactic masked as being consumer-friendly.

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.

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https://www.pcinvasion.com/nvidia-mining-cards-turing-lineup...

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...

There's a sliver of hope that the mining cards will be reusable as general purpose gpus by having the card stream its output to an integrated gpu.

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")

> Remember a few years back when used mining cards flooded the market and you could get a decent GPU dirt cheap?

No, not at all. Any references?

You don't remember when GTX 1080 Tis could be had on eBay for as cheap as $400-$450??

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.

> You don't remember when GTX 1080 Tis could be had on eBay for as cheap as $400-$450??

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.

> 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.

The GPUs going into the mining cards, are GPUs that would have become e-waste anyway—just at the chip validation step, before they ever got used for anything, because they had flaws that made them unsuitable for gaming on.

This is false, many are just lower binned ampere

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