Madoc
Gawd
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All I'll say is that there is *no freaking way* that I'll be buying a used GPU, no matter how attractive the price. That's just a no-brainer, IMO.
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Crypto Miners, Not Gamers, Were The Primary Buyers of Graphics Cards Since 2021, Almost $15 Billion Worth of GPU Sales Reported
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Gideon
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Ahh come on, they will tell you it was ran under clocked and under volted then forget to mention they pushed the memory so hard it was running at 100 degrees. Then you see people post, hey this used card I got has all kinds of artifacts when I play games. No thanks on used cards these days.
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Bankie
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They've already made more than their investments back. Sure there's a risk that ETH won't bounce back but if we go by what has happened with it in the past it's likely to return and pass previous ATHs eventually. They're not hurting for money so to them continuing to mine and even expanding their mining rig/s is a no brainer for them.
They only made their investments back if they managed to liquidate their coins and cash out, which is something like 10% of the market. The remaining 90% are just kinda stuck there holding on for the ride.
DukenukemX
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My cousin has a Eth farm with twelve GPU's and he's making $6 per day. I don't think it's even paying for the electricity at this point. 3090's as well as 3080's are premium cards and therefore will be out of reach of most consumers even after the crash. Even still, there's stories of 3090's going bad after a while due to issues. I see repair channels like this one where the guy is repairing a lot of 3090's, 3080's, and even a 2080 Super. I don't see a lot of AMD cards needing repair. It seems that Nvidia's high end cards are under a lot of stress and I wouldn't buy them just for that reason alone. I'd go for 3060 Ti's and 3070's for Nvidia, and 6700 xt for AMD. I'd have to get a nearly 1000W PSU just to power these high end cards which is just nuts.
If you want to mine then you have my blessing, but don't complain when you lose money. Unless you're someone who's running a large operation who knows how to source their cards, then you could just be dumping money into overpriced GPU's and then finding yourself selling them later on for less than MSRP. Don't let me catch you complaining.
Bitcoin has push back to prevent the decline, so it'll take a while before it plummets, but it will plummet. Same goes for the stock market as the Dow Jones is hovering around 30k. Both seem to be back at their December 2020 values, so there's more room for market correction. I think Bitcoin will bottom out at $15k at some point.
Nah, I'd rather buy them cheap. All my GPU's for the past decade have been from miners and they still all work. My Vega 56 works like a champ. Not buying them is doing AMD and Nvidia a favor. Just make sure you test the cards extensively and redo the thermal paste. I'm also a fan of using K5 PRO Viscous Thermal Paste instead of using thermal pads. Any miner worth a damn would have undervolted the GPU and would have extensively ran cool air flow over them as well. That doesn't mean all miners were smart.
Whoa now, get out of here with all that fancy evidence.
I've setup/run somewhere around 1000 cards since 2017 and Ive had a grand total of 0 failures (aside from a few DOA's). None of them had artifacting, all my cards that are/were sold are fully stress tested before selling (and yes I test each one on a test bench individually). Never had a buyer complain or recieve a DOA card. With that said, I also treat my cards well and run them at safe temps.
Used mined cards are fine 99% of the time, with one exception: DDR6X cards. If someone is selling a used ddr6x card that was mined on, ask to see what temps they were run at. Without upgraded thermal pads, almost all ddr6X cards will easily hit 100C+ mem temp and likely just sit at 115C, throttling. If they can't prove they were run at safe temps, then for all you know they just let them sit at 115C. The amount of screenshots Ive seen of noob miners showing 110C+ ddr6x temps, without a care in the world, is downright scary.
I actually tried buying a 3080 from someone on here (admitting it was mined on), and politely asked if they had a screenshot of hashrate/temps. I got radio silence. These are the people to be wary of. Without proof, assume the worst.
If you're still paranoid, only buy a card under warranty. Some mfg's (like EVGA/MSI/Asus) will honor/transfer the warranty based on the serial, and not the original owner. Zotac, Powercolor and Sapphire (sadly) don't. Another thing to keep in mind is some shitty mfg's will void your warranty if you open it, to replace the paste/pads (looking at you, Zotac. Fuck Zotac). Evga is one example I know for sure will allow you to dissassemble and re-paste/pad without any warranty issues.
The reality is though this topic is so heated, and a lot of people will never change their mind. "Ill never buy a mined on gpu" but you'l never know the history of a used card, period. There were so many posts last year of people trying to figure out how to setup their cards on nicehash while their PC was idle. Also the amount of people that bought a handful of cards the last couple years for mining is staggering, and most of them are for sale right now with descriptions like "Never mined on, never overclocked" etc. People lie about this shit all the time. I always admit my cards were mined on when selling, which probably kills some sales, but at least Im honest.
/end rant
Gideon
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That's why I would avoid any used 3000 series card now. They very likely have been mined on if they are suddenly selling now and the memory likely cooked on them, especially when they seem to keep selling another video card they don't need anymore. Just like last time when the mining bubble popped and suddenly you could find a 290x card that was gently used for sale.
Thankfully there is a few honest people that just admit what they were using the card for.
DukenukemX
Supreme [H]ardness
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I've also accidentally bought a mining card with no video output on it. The seller didn't mention that and listed the card with HDMI and DP ports. The seller took it back but keep an eye out for those type of cards since they're meat for mining only.
So for those of us not following too closely, is this like Silicon degradation on the cards just like if you overclock/volt a CPU? I had my 2600k overclocked and over volted to maintain that clock for 9 years (this thing was on all the time).....over time the OC had to be backed down from 4.8 to 4.7 to 4.6.....but it could have also been the MB going bad, etc.
Mined cards have been rode hard and put away wet.....but in the end the question is......unless you, yourself, are going to mine on them..........for gaming, which rarely seems to push cards in real world examples the way synthetic benchmarks or stress tests do......is there really a risk? Like you plug it in and the games artifact or throttle immediately?
All of this may be academic, these cards are piling up on the retail vendors so you may be able to get new cards below MSRP soon and then you'll see boards on the used market being cheap enough where you just flip the YOLO switch and buy used.
Mined cards have been rode hard and put away wet.....but in the end the question is......unless you, yourself, are going to mine on them..........for gaming, which rarely seems to push cards in real world examples the way synthetic benchmarks or stress tests do......is there really a risk? Like you plug it in and the games artifact or throttle immediately?
All of this may be academic, these cards are piling up on the retail vendors so you may be able to get new cards below MSRP soon and then you'll see boards on the used market being cheap enough where you just flip the YOLO switch and buy used.
You really can't deny the demand side of the equation. There's no secret mining operations were consuming a disproportionately high number of GPUs, and when companies are seeing high margin products like GPUs flying off the shelf, they are dedicating more and more silicon to fulfilling that demand which, in turn, means less silicon available to build PS5s. Now they are producing more GPUs, but crypto is also crashing, so the demand for them has also shrunk.
It's fine if you want to mine or whatever, that's a use case for the product, but there is zero chance it didn't exacerbate the supply problem. A gamer will buy one, maybe two GPUs. A miner would buy them by the planeload. Without mining, that planeload would have reached more gamers. I don't understand why this is even up to debate. Nvidia kept miner sales intentionally opaque for a reason, and recently lost an investor lawsuit for doing so.
Thunderdolt
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I read the link in the OP. The author shares no basis for his headline claim. He links to a Bloomberg article which which also does not make the headline claim.
Looking at Nvidia and AMD annual reports, it's easy to see how the claim is total BS. They simply don't have enough total revenue for the $15 billion claim to be correct unless that's the sum total of miner spends since 2017 or so.
Looking at Nvidia and AMD annual reports, it's easy to see how the claim is total BS. They simply don't have enough total revenue for the $15 billion claim to be correct unless that's the sum total of miner spends since 2017 or so.
True the article make not the first attempt to explain the click bait title.
But it could be misleading that 15 billions is impossible, considering how large the gap between what a miner paid for a card in 2021 versus how much Nvidia charge an AIB for the actual chips and miners buying 5700xt/2080 super, etc... cards, made in 2020 new cards and so on.
Third quarter of Nvidia was completely an outlier with 7.1 billions in revenues (a near 30 billions a year) (to note fiscal year seem to be different than calendar year quite a bit)
What the ratio on a sales of an card goes to Nvidia regularly ? How much of the high price people were paying (about half than the usual, I could see under 20% on some models/price, even under 15% for some ebay pricing at the worst) ?
In a single quarter like Q3 2021, AIB sales of DGPU were estimated to 13.7 billions:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/jpr-q3-2021-desktop-discrete-gpu-shipments
Sales of graphics cards reached $13.7 billion in Q3.
Making a 15 billions figure possible (and not most of the cards I think, specially if that include used cards they bought)
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Well a $1000 card probably only gives NVidia $300 revenue or something.
Furious_Styles
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I agree with xenium about used cards. I've bought a bunch on here that were used from well regarded sellers and had no issues. I also take good care of my cards and make sure they run well below max temps.
Same.
kirbyrj
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First of all, AMD is contractually obligated to produce X number of PS5/XBX APUs independent of their other interests. They might very well make more money off selling 6900s, but they are obligated to produce APUs for consoles which consumes a good portion of their fab space (the idea being that they will produce it for 7-10 years selling 100 million units and costs improve over time). AMD launched GPUs, console APUs and Zen 3 CPUs in the same time frame, yet doesn't fab their own chips. This very likely contributed to the lack of AMD GPUs available.
Second, I never said that mining didn't have something to do with GPU scarcity, but it certainly wasn't the ONLY cause as evidenced by the fact that there is a chip shortage in virtually every sector that uses silicon. Crypto is the convenient boogeyman even when it's harder to buy a brand new car at MSRP than it is a GPU right now due to chip shortages. Everyone loves to point to this "buying by the pallet" or "planeload" when in reality the average crypto miner mined with his own GPU and maybe a handful of others in his residence. Not everyone (I would argue hardly anyone) has the space or the infrastructure to support a pallet of cards let alone a planeload. Look at the chart above if Nvidia is making 26+ billion in revenue then a plane load here or there isn't really affecting availability.
The reality is cards were always available. Unfortunately, scalpers gamed the system and got to them first. The average miner or even just a forward thinking gamer realized that he could make back the money even with the insane markup within a reasonable timeframe where the average gamer said, "Fuck that, I'm not paying that price" and ended up with no card.
There are no less than 10 people on this forum, and more in the local area, that are using cards from me, used for this purpose - with full and complete disclosure.
If you know and trust the supplier, there is no reason not to use the cards at a favorable price.
hititnquitit
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I have no qualms at all buying a mined on card... from someone I trust. Thing is, I can count on one hand the people I know that are tech savvy enough to know anything about crypto or gpus (other than what Matt Damon told them). And fewer yet that would actually show any interest in creating income from mining. The one person that's left has great intentions but is a complete fuck up technologically. So no cut rate gpus for me.
Aren't most articles click bait nowadays? True or not, it got a relatively interesting discussion started. So it's not all bad.
Aren't most articles click bait nowadays? True or not, it got a relatively interesting discussion started. So it's not all bad.
DooKey
[H]F Junkie
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Mining was a major driver of scarcity and high prices.
This chart shows that supply wasn't that low for NV cards compared to previous generations of cards.
Pascal was a high-water mark and Turing low. Ampere was shipping well. Demand was way up. This is probably due to cost of Turing and mining coming back strong.
AMD sucked on deliveries because of limited wafers and prioritizing higher margin products/delivery contracts.
This chart shows that supply wasn't that low for NV cards compared to previous generations of cards.
Pascal was a high-water mark and Turing low. Ampere was shipping well. Demand was way up. This is probably due to cost of Turing and mining coming back strong.
AMD sucked on deliveries because of limited wafers and prioritizing higher margin products/delivery contracts.
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Thunderdolt
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100% this. The "average crypto miner" is a gamer who owns a single gaming card that he uses to play games on. There are times when he is not playing games. That's when the card is used for crypto. Mining crypto on the side likely funded the upgrade for those gamers. So, yes, crypto led to the purchase, but the intended use of the card was for gaming by a gamer.
Nobody wants to talk about how large entities like Facebook have been putting as many as 16,000 A100s into a single data center. Based on public releases, Facebook owns something on the order of 30,000 A100s across the whole company. This doesn't include any Geforce/Quadro/Axxxx cards which they also bought. The US Department of Energy has a single installation with 6,159 A100s. While those two may be the two largest customers, there are 100s more with 3k+ Ampere GPUs that are not used for mining.
That could be true, but the more important question is the average mining cards not the average miners (maybe median is a better word or we do not weight the miners by the numbers of cards they used when we averaged them)).
That seem big numbers for that type of cards, but there is over 10 millions DGPU solds every 3 months, 3-5 millions consoles every 3 months, etc... I am not sure look at some 1k,10k usage that big (how many 7nm chips went into testla and into cars during that time, I imagine hundreds of thousands ?).
Take it that way Eth hasrate is currently around:
1,212,832,278,025,655 H/s, according to https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/ethereum/hashrate-chart
That if we use an average of 63.8 mh/s by card, that would be around 2 millions cards running.
Beside I feel like the place that took the business/server/network side for that type of product among a company like NVidia is talked about a lot, but when we talk about video cards pressures, we want to talk about millions of cards every month not being bough by gamers because of X, that the type of scale we are talking about I think.
pendragon1
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thats nice.
still dont trust them. they can eat the cost for the free money the pulled from thin air.
no need to reply, you wont change my mind.
filthy miners.
Yes, AMD might have contractural obligations to provide Sony with X number of chips. That doesn't matter much when there is a general raw material shortage, AMD is not the only company trying to get supplies of silicon to manufacture their product, and miners were showing a preference for Nvidia GPUs. Crypto miners put a measurable strain on that raw material supply chain. That's all I am saying. Denying that is denying reality. Every study, projection, whatever, has put crypto mining as a source of significant demand for GPUs. Yes, scalpers bought them up because they saw there was an insatiable demand coming from people who did exactly what you said; paid 3x the price and didn't care because they were going to make it back anyway mining. That doesn't mean the market wasn't fundamentally broken with crypto mining being a significant contributor. Yes, it wasn't the "only" contributor. I don't think anyone suggested it was. The data is showing that it had a rather large impact though.
Axman
VP of Extreme Liberty
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This is a weird way of saying companies were selling video cards to mining businesses and not gamers.
Slinging heat at hobby miners is a lot easier than admitting things like LHR cards were a joke and nothing more than marketing to keep the fanbase locked in.
Slinging heat at hobby miners is a lot easier than admitting things like LHR cards were a joke and nothing more than marketing to keep the fanbase locked in.
Thunderdolt
Gawd
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I would not reject the idea of Nvidia not wanting to see a sea of cheap ampere cards on the used market in 2023 from miners during a crash when lower end Lovelace launch was a real thing, specially considering how long it seem to have took to be worked around.
Axman
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Nvidia doesn't plan to make a lot of lower-end cards going forward. They want people to buy used or new old stock from previous generations. AMD, too, but they'll have APUs to serve the entry-level and mid-tier bracket.
Absalom
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By having a flood of relatively cheap ampere cards on the market (not necessarily a bad thing for consumers) Nvidia now have the challenge of making whatever they decide to launch next stand out. If the next launch is met with lukewarm reception, then they will be in it for the long haul. The party is over.
By lower end I mean cards for which an good price used 3070ti/3080/3080Ti can be a competition, the future 4060/4070 cards.
With TSMC’s most recent price change announcements they have increased their rates by nearly 70% since this time last year. That alone is going to kill off the “good price” segment of the market.
Which would make the issue of vast amount of used cards in it even bigger.
sfsuphysics
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I'd buy a GPU from a miner, but then again the value I put on it is a fraction of original MSRP, it seems that "used cards" are still selling for above MSRP levels which I personally don't feel like their worth and I'd say the fact I can easily snatch a used card up shows that as true.
kirbyrj
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The FS threads have 3090s going for $1000-1100 which is a pretty good discount. I'll sell you my 3080Ti FTW3 for $900 ($1400 FTW3 card) since I got a 3090. Used cards asking retail price aren't moving at all.
funkydmunky
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This makes sense to me as mining usually loves memory, the more and the faster the better. Nvidia's 3000 series high-end are pushing the RAM spec harder then AMD's offerings. Many RAM woes of 3080ti/3090's out there.
sfsuphysics
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Thanks, but if I'm buying used cards it's not going to be at the high end just to help mitigate the risk a bit.
And yeah people still trying to get retail from used are fairly delusional.
DukenukemX
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The way things work is that manufacturers find the sweet spot at which a chip can run before degradation takes hold. Considering how many chips have lasted for decades, I imagine this isn't a problem unless somebody pumps voltage and clocks speeds above OEM. Miners though will usually undervolt their GPU's to save electricity and heat, since the minor loss in hash rates is usually outweighed by the amount of electricity saved. Miners aren't worried about frame rates or maxing out their performance but trying to get the best balance of power consumption and hash rates. The miners we should be worried about are the ones that didn't make any adjustments to the voltage and threw their mining stuff in a closet where it'll cook from lack of air ventilation.
Krenum
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You are not factoring in the asics which go towards the hashrate totals. I dont know what the % on that would be though.
Right, with you on this, but what I don't get is the worry......like other posters have said "I never buy used, those things have been overclocked to hell and back". To me, I go "nice, proven track record, will you take an anonymous out of state check?"
The thinking: These cards, even if running in stock, untweaked form will thermally protect themselves habitually and run within specs...and the cards are, what, 2 years old at most? If your caps pop or cold solders fail I'd think its equally likely that you'd see that happening from repeated on/off cycles as it would from just having the thing crunching numbers 24/7 at stock everything, no? So if its sitting in a hot case/rack......so what. They're basically designed to be built into systems that sometimes have the cooling of a mink coat, like 80% of all OEM systems, so cards that have mined....what performance
degradation do they show.............I want to say a YouTube channel of some respect did a video on this a year or more ago but can't recall which one and the answer was "yep, no difference to a new one", the only concern being........these cards may not last as long.
Of course...."last as long" is a relative term....do I care if my old 670's haven't lasted at peak performance until today, or even the aforementioned 2600k I overclocked to heck........not really, they aren't necessarily viable anymore anyhow.
I was just wondering if I was missing out on something with the whole "no NO never buy mined cards!" thing..........