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Comment by NazakiAid | Hacker News Reader

A major bad point with this is when the mining cards become obsolete, they won't be able to be used as a graphics card in a computer due to it not being able to output to a display. So realistically it will decrease avaliable graphic card supply to gamers in the future who are maybe looking for a cheap used graphics card (therefore pushing people to buy a new card instead). Short term fix, long term problem.

I was thinking they could maybe get a second use in industry however they mostly buy new cards (from my limited knowledge on it).

Nvidia knows the strats to make $$$ in the long term under the guise of the good guy.

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How big is the used market for graphics cards though? Common advice is to avoid buying used unless you also price in the risk that the card was used as a miner and hasn't been taken care of.

Aside from the recent drought of GPUs and pricing madness, you could buy low-end current-gen cards that could outperform higher-end previous-gen parts.

I don't have a citation for how massive the used market is, but I can tell you without a doubt that people in my circles buy used cards, and that I commonly heard it as advice to save a buck.

My most recent card purchase was used. I bought a used GTX 1070 for $230 in 2019, when the 2000-series was new. I've been happy with the price and performance; it hasn't died or anything.

> Aside from the recent drought of GPUs and pricing madness, you could buy low-end current-gen cards that could outperform higher-end previous-gen parts.

This wasn't true at the time. The high-end parts just have many multiples of the compute units of the low end cards. Nvidia 3xxx isn't 100% faster than 2xxx or 1xxx on a per-unit basis, and the x080 cards have several times the compute of the x030 or 50 parts.

Another relevant concern is GPU RAM; the lower end parts just have less RAM. Game performance completely falls over if more RAM is needed than the card has. Very large displays need a ton of GPU RAM.

The used market is huge. Even before the shortage, newer used GPUs were selling for 75% or more of their new price, from my memory.

big, computer parts in general have a good second hand market

Used graphics card were/are a big market (even though new cards depeciate massively when used). Usually crypto cards still last a decent amount of time (and might even have been thrashed while water cooled to keep them healthy). The price of them make up for the fact they have been ran constantly. And the price makes up for the fact of being outdated in-terms of performance. They are great for budget PC's. Many people still buy GTX 970's etc.

Graphics cards without display outputs are still useful, you can use them for VFIO and gpgpu workloads

What's the market for second hand GPUs for scientific computing, compared to second hand GPUs for gaming?

like anything else, worth quite a bit to the right customer, until they become functionally obsolete (f.ex: nobody really cares about Kepler hardware anymore and it's gotten quite cheap)

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m...

now, being that mining cards didn't start at $10k per card to begin with, they won't sell at $10k per card on the secondhand market, but they'll do OK.

at a hundred bucks, why wouldn't you pick one up for your folding@home rig, vs paying full freight for a card with a graphics output you'll never use?

NV sells tons of cards used for things other than mining and video output already. The mining cards can be repurposed for those use cases (compute, machine learning, etc)

This is incorrect since the onboard HDMI output can be used for that as well (or a secondary GPU).

There are tons of use cases for GPUs outside of output to a display: audio/video encoding, render farms, scientific computing.

True. I just assumed people (or most likely companies) who are doing these types of things generally will be buying the latest GPU new as they have more money to spend (and want to get a good life out of the card).

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