Ethereum Hashrate Performance Drop Might Be Coming

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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Nathan "Numchuck" Kirsch of Legit Reviews fame has an article up today addressing some of the questions that are on Miners' minds. The first and foremost being, "Did I just drop a huge amount of money on a Radeon based video card for no reason?" I know I unloaded two of the RX 480 cards that I bought for VR Reviews this month for $380 each. I think it is the first time in my entire life that I sold a piece of computer hardware for more than I paid for it. As my dear friend Mr. Sheen would say, "Winning!" Maybe I got out of my 480 cards at exactly the right time.

AMD might be able to work some magic on the driver side. AMD and NVIDIA are both rumored to be working on bringing dedicated mining GPUs to market here soon, so now that they are spending money to focus on miners we can likely assume that driver support will be improving. If a magic driver fix is not possible get ready to see people selling Radeon RX 400/500 series cards and switching to GeForce GTX 1060 and GeForce GTX 1070 models!
 
Good news for people looking at a Polaris card for gaming, I guess, but Vega will be out by the time the worst DAGs hit.
 
I have no idea what any of this means but looking at the graph it appears whomever bought my 290Xs should be happy still.
 
Looks like I'll be holding my 390X's a little longer. They just might go way up in price.
 
Is this when the market gets flooded with used Polaris cards?

Out of curiosity, are these GPUs used for mining safe to buy? Or would constant mining on them affect them quickly?

Feels almost like there should be a shelter for these neglected and abused GPUs.
 
Riccochet said:
Looks like I'll be holding my 390X's a little longer. They just might go way up in price.
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I thought about holding me 390 longer too. But the rest of my build wont be done for another month or 2 so I figured I can wait for other GPUS to come down in price hopefully X_X
 
SeymourGore said:
Is this when the market gets flooded with used Polaris cards?

Out of curiosity, are these GPUs used for mining safe to buy? Or would constant mining on them affect them quickly?

Feels almost like there should be a shelter for these neglected and abused GPUs.
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They have been running full tilt boogie 24/7 since birth, I would have doubts.
 
Riccochet said:
Looks like I'll be holding my 390X's a little longer. They just might go way up in price.
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Might go way down in price if the crypto market crashes again. I'd sell them now, personally, while they're still worth good money.

I personally do not buy cards for my mining rigs in the good periods... it doesn't make any financial sense when they're in high demand like this. I mine with what I have, wait for a crash, and then buy more cards when people realize they can't reach ROI by mining with them and flood the market in the need to sell them and get money back.
 
SeymourGore said:
Out of curiosity, are these GPUs used for mining safe to buy? Or would constant mining on them affect them quickly?
Click to expand...

If they still work they should be ok. The problem is that a lot of the people dumping cards last time seemed to not be particularly honest or bright. I got two 290X's for a good price during the last crash and they still work fine, but I also got burned twice by sellers with good feedback (on one the seller had tried to glue the stock heatsink back on with thermal paste...) and had to deal with the fleabay refund process.
 
SeymourGore said:
Is this when the market gets flooded with used Polaris cards?

Out of curiosity, are these GPUs used for mining safe to buy? Or would constant mining on them affect them quickly?

Feels almost like there should be a shelter for these neglected and abused GPUs.
Click to expand...

One good thing about buying used mining hardware, all of the early crib deaths have been taken care of. If the price is right, buy two and plan on swapping out if the first one dies.
 
Dead Parrot said:
One good thing about buying used mining hardware, all of the early crib deaths have been taken care of. If the price is right, buy two and plan on swapping out if the first one dies.
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Sometimes they are undervolted as well, so not too bad. Cards are meant to run at the voltage from the manufacturer for ~5 years, should be good.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
If they still work they should be ok. The problem is that a lot of the people dumping cards last time seemed to not be particularly honest or bright.
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I can vouch for that. I had two eBay sellers this year try to get something past me.

First guy sold me a reference 290. I routinely repaste all these cards when I get them, and when I pulled the HSF off this card I immediately noticed most of the TIM was missing from the VRMs and RAM. It had clearly been apart before. Seller claimed it came new from Newegg that way (yeah right). Used half a tube of MX-4 on it, put it back together, and it immediately blew the fan controller. Had to hardwire the fan to the PCIe connectors to get it to work again, but it did. That was months ago - it's my coolest running 290 now.

Second guy sold me two Sapphire 280X Vapor-X cards. I love these because the fans usually go bad and I can often get them cheap because of that. This genius threw them both into one Sapphire retail box, wrapped it in brown paper, and shipped them that way. One was fine, the other came out with a bunch of sheared off transistors. Got money back for the damaged one, fixed the transistors as best I could (couldn't find them all), strapped a 120x38mm Delta to it, threw it in a mining rig just to see if it worked, and that one too has been mining ever since albeit severely downvolted to make sure it's having as easy a life as possible.
 
SeymourGore said:
Is this when the market gets flooded with used Polaris cards?

Out of curiosity, are these GPUs used for mining safe to buy? Or would constant mining on them affect them quickly?

Feels almost like there should be a shelter for these neglected and abused GPUs.
Click to expand...

I would personally never buy a card used for mining. That makes the secondary market for these a bit more difficult to tap, to be honest, but that's just a fact of life at this point.
 
Why don't people just buy those little mining boxes instead of a bunch of expensive cards?
 
face2palm said:
Why don't people just buy those little mining boxes instead of a bunch of expensive cards?
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ASICs are usually fairly expensive, made in limitecan be poorly engineered fire hazards, or mined on by the manufacturer until they're borderline unprofitable by the time they get off the slow boat from China to get to your house. Or any combination of those.

GPU based mining rigs, on the other hand, can be built up over time as budget allows. They're also more versatile... ASICs usually only mine one algorithm.
 
Oklahoma Wolf said:
ASICs are usually fairly expensive, made in limitecan be poorly engineered fire hazards, or mined on by the manufacturer until they're borderline unprofitable by the time they get off the slow boat from China to get to your house. Or any combination of those.

GPU based mining rigs, on the other hand, can be built up over time as budget allows. They're also more versatile... ASICs usually only mine one algorithm.
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Ah good to know. I'm new to the whole mining thing so those are off the table for sure.
 
... If miners are using GPUs to essentially mine money, why can't GPU vendors do the same themselves, instead of just selling cards with improved mining performance?

Either way this mining craze never made sense to me so I'm staying out.
 
i purchased a 1080 for $439.. after selling all my $169 RX 480s for $300 each :)
 
StoleMyOwnCar said:
... If miners are using GPUs to essentially mine money, why can't GPU vendors do the same themselves, instead of just selling cards with improved mining performance?

Either way this mining craze never made sense to me so I'm staying out.
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They would have to build data centers with low cost of power, buy motherboards, power supplies, hire staff, -- they could its just not their business model.
 
StoleMyOwnCar said:
... If miners are using GPUs to essentially mine money, why can't GPU vendors do the same themselves, instead of just selling cards with improved mining performance?
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Because they make more money selling GPU's. And they're already managing a substantial level of risk in doing that.

Like previous post said its not their business model. However Nvidia does have some interesting products in the pipeline for the mining market and I expect to see them become more aggressive.
 
StoleMyOwnCar said:
... If miners are using GPUs to essentially mine money, why can't GPU vendors do the same themselves, instead of just selling cards with improved mining performance?

Either way this mining craze never made sense to me so I'm staying out.
Click to expand...


Ha that'd be awesome (read funny and crazy) if AMD just said we are going private and only introducing all new GPU cards for the purposes of mining internal crypto currency.
Have fun with the fickle gamers Nvidia.


But actually - I bet Nvidia is more 'setup' to do this. They have that Nvidia shield network with all the cloud GPUs for gamers to game in high quality on their little tegra streaming devices. There are probably 3-4 key hour blocks where the majority of their streaming gamer customers go to sleep in mass. (Assuming Europe and America are their biggest customer blocks) --- at those times they could just set that cloud to crypto mining.
 
Archaea said:
Ha that'd be awesome (read funny and crazy) if AMD just said we are going private and only introducing all new GPU cards for the purposes of mining internal crypto currency.
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That would be suicidal more than anything else.
 
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AMD going to design for crypto mining? Their partners already are! Checkout this easter egg from my Ryzen-based X370 motherboard BIOS, that I purchased a month ago.

I heard they only had <1 month to ship the boards, so this may have been from AMD.
 

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Jim Kim said:
They have been running full tilt boogie 24/7 since birth, I would have doubts.
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Many of the 290/X's that were unloaded after the last mining bubble popped were mined 24/7 too and many are still running today.

I've got a vanilla 290 that I bought for around $200 back then and its still going strong without issues and I use it for GPGPU stuff all the time.
 
StoleMyOwnCar said:
... If miners are using GPUs to essentially mine money, why can't GPU vendors do the same themselves, instead of just selling cards with improved mining performance?
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Because they know its BS but they don't mind selling a cheap card for a higher price to suckers.
 
WTF happing now it seem that even nVidia card are shooting for the moon in sky high prices that even 1080 starting to look like the better buy for now over 1070 but at this rate I never be able to get that kind of cash save up by year ends so now all my plans just been push back even further back :cry:.
I guest I have stick to what I have for now in tell the crypto currencies bubble pop.
 
Krenum said:
I realize its supply and demand & I have no problem making money or being opportunistic, but when I can't purchase a product I want at the MSRP price or even close to it, its very frustrating.
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First world problem.
 
Can anyone confirm the performance drop? I tried to run the Claymore miner benchmark on various simulated DAGs and it crashed. Thanks for the heads up, Kyle.

Edit: I just tried Genoil miner's benchmark software and it does look like there will be a dropoff, but maybe not as drastic as Claymore miner predicts?

Results:
DAG Epoch 0: 78.3MH/s (3 x RX 480s)
DAG Epoch 130: 77.6MH/s (3 x RX 480s)
DAG Epoch 199: 45.7MH/s (3 x RX 480s)
 
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