Crypto miners are hoarding early shipments of RTX 3080s

[Orangeator]

4 hours ago, Lord Vile said:

They put a hacked BIOS on it anyway

True, but, if its blocked at the silicon level, good luck getting around that.

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

There may be additional drivers in other countries due to regulations.  There may be special stuff in China. I don’t know. Also if electricity is free it becomes free money. Just not very much.  Crypto mining more or less turns electrical power into cash at ever decreasing efficiency.  It will always probably continue in situations where electricity costs $0

At some point the cost in property tax to have the machine sitting to run hours on end will far outweigh the few rupees it'll earn.

[RotoCoreOne]

12 hours ago, AndreiArgeanu said:

Oh noooo, now I can't waste the 700$ that I don't have on a new graphics card, what am I gonna do?

If I can't get one, guess I'll just increase my ssd storage and w/e else

[SpaceGhostC2C]

4 hours ago, X-System said:

Do you play games nonstop (24 hours and 365 days, it's no life) and with many graphics cards at the same time ?

So? You don't pay a flat rate, you pay per Kwh. So you/they pay for what you/they se regardless.

 

People can't have it both ways: good price/performance and people who make money out of GPUs' performance not buying them.

Whether anyone still makes money out of GPUs and is buying these particular ones is still to be seen, though.

[Lord Vile]

3 hours ago, Orangeator said:

True, but, if its blocked at the silicon level, good luck getting around that.

Then they gimp performance. No matter what blocks you put in place people will find a way around it.

[Brooksie359]

14 hours ago, valdyrgramr said:

The problem with RDNA is that it lacks key feats that made Vega Gen 1 aka 56 and 64, Gen 2 aka the VII, and Furys better at it and other tasks.  The main benefits came from the combination of HBM and HBM2 backed by the CUs,  iirc.  RDNA was pretty craptastic compared to HBM and HBM2 offerings by AMD in several tasks while having advantage in gaming only from what I remember.

While that maybe true rdna was for gaming and not those applications. They have a professional line of graphics cards for a reason. 

[RejZoR]

CDNA is for compute operations, RDNA is for rendering aka games. NVIDIA made that separation long time ago between GeForce and Quadro cards. And partially Titan cards.

[Patrik_]

You have to remember that by this nvidia is screwing themselfs because If AMD jumps out and saves the day by actually having cards avaible than Its a win for AMD  

Edit: Especialy Pascal user like me who wants to upgrade for great value

[HM-2]

6 hours ago, Orangeator said:

True, but, if its blocked at the silicon level, good luck getting around that.

I don't know why vendors don't institute hardware level signature validation as has become normal on things like routers and switches. I suppose it's because it doesn't really matter to the likes of NVidia who buys their cards, and they don't have to pay out warranty claims if you brick a card with a bad BIOS. 

[Suika]

9 hours ago, cj09beira said:

how is it any different to you and me playing games, dont throw around such authoritarian proposals.

There's a pretty big difference between the two if you think about it. For example, mining loads last for significantly longer periods of time and can (assuming you don't alter voltages and whatnot) push cards to higher levels of power consumption than gaming loads, making the act of mining much more devastating for the environment than gaming.

 

I personally don't think power companies need to get directly involved, and a federal tax over the creation of cryptocurrency to help defray the environmental impact would be better, but that's just me.

 

Also, environmental restrictions and regulations aren't "authoritarian." A bit of a gross misuse of the term, if you ask me.

[Moonzy]

10 minutes ago, Suika said:

(assuming you don't alter voltages and whatnot)

every miner i know undervolts for better efficiency

 

tbh those who overvolt their cards for mining probably dont know what they're doing

[Aereldor]

19 hours ago, jaslion said:

I'm good with my gpu for now so when the market crashes again I welcome the flood of 3000 series gpu's on the used market.

Yeah except mining cards are infinitely more likely to die on you very soon.

[jaslion]

28 minutes ago, Aereldor said:

Yeah except mining cards are infinitely more likely to die on you very soon.

Thats why when the miners start dumping them you get a non mined card as either way the prices will fall down. Just like what happened with the rx400/500s.

[CarlBar]

6 minutes ago, Escanor said:

Maybe Nvidia should block mining on their gpu least around first month's while supply is not stable yet assuming that is gonna be a problem.

 

As was pointed out by someone else earlier in this thread both AMD and NVIDIA have a legal obligation to maximise profits. Doing anything to hamper miners, unless NVIDIA can prove they'll make the difference back on normal buyers is actually illegal under those rules.

[Bombastinator]

8 hours ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

At some point the cost in property tax to have the machine sitting to run hours on end will far outweigh the few rupees it'll earn.

There is that.  The only continuous purpose for the stuff it seems is buying illegal drugs though, so value may increase as that gets harder and harder to do.

[Kisai]

16 hours ago, X-System said:

Do you play games nonstop (24 hours and 365 days, it's no life) and with many graphics cards at the same time ?

No, but the Power companies know exactly who is doing large scale crypto coin mining, because they give them bulk discounts on energy to burn dirty power. Even people who are doing it in their home are easily detected, less you forget that "grow ops" are still illegal in many places.

 

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbk7wy/how-much-energy-growing-weed-vs-mining-bitcoin

 

https://www.cryptoglobe.com/latest/2019/02/australia-police-raid-cryptocurrency-miner-s-home-seeking-weed-grow-op/

 

https://techland.time.com/2011/05/23/report-police-confuse-bitcoin-miners-power-use-for-weed-grow-op/

 

 

Like at worst, if you live in a typical apartment, it has 100A service (mine has 4 15A circuits, the rest is the stove) so the maximum usable power is 172.8kWh/day, if I were to unplug the fridge and not do anything to the stove. BC's power is 10.29c/kWh so $17.79/day it would cost to maximize the power use in the apartment without any alterations to it. Assuming a residential home could maximize an entire 100A circuit, That's 288kWh/day or 8640kWh/mo that's still just 29.64/mo. However that's a gross estimate since the actual cost is tiered here. Actual residential is about 9.3c for the first 1350kWh and then it's 14c per kwh, and likewise the (legal) farm rate is 11.2c/kWh

 

 

If you read that last article, you'll note that the one city in BC permits the RCMP to search a home if it uses more than 93kWh per day. Which if you do the math is slightly under one third or 8 of 24 hours of a 100A service. So the assumption is that short of having a hot tub or heated pool, there is no logical explanation for using more than 32.3A per day. 30A itself is two standard 15A circuits. And a typical PC that runs 24 hours simply doesn't hit that. You likely won't even cross that threshold unless you have a 7 HEDT desktops maxed out and running 24 hours per day.

 

[BuckGup]

20 hours ago, X-System said:

It would be good if electricty companies raise the cost in kWh to crypto miners because it's not good for the environment. (8x RTX 3080 = 22.4MWh for a year !)

 

Except for Folding@Home because it's important to help the medical research

22.4MWh seems like a ton until you realize how wasteful we are in other areas

[CarlBar]

1 hour ago, BuckGup said:

22.4MWh seems like a ton until you realize how wasteful we are in other areas

 

Yeah it's less than half of what us Britons use every tv ad break making a fresh cup of tea.

[Quinnell]

1 minute ago, CarlBar said:

 

Yeah it's less than half of what us Britons use every tv ad break making a fresh cup of tea.

So the lesson here is... Make less tea!  I solved the world's carbon footprint guys.

[pythonmegapixel]

1 minute ago, Quinnell said:

So the lesson here is... Make less tea!  I solved the world's carbon footprint guys.

Oh no, you're not a Brit. You can't possibly understand the societal implications to us of cutting our tea consumption

[CarlBar]

2 hours ago, Quinnell said:

So the lesson here is... Make less tea!  I solved the world's carbon footprint guys.

 

A lot of the power used for that comes from Hydro.

 

Video on it if your curious:

 

 

[Brooksie359]

11 hours ago, valdyrgramr said:

Well, Vega gen 1 were cards that could game and do compute as well.   Even in this gen there was vega 2/the vii which came out before RDNA which was labeled as both a gaming card+pro card.  Still hoping for a gen 3 vega.

Vega 2 was a rebranded professional card and they didn't even make money off of it. That was the problem with vega was that they didn't make money off the cards because they were so expensive to produce. 

[CarlBar]

 

5 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

Vega 2 was a rebranded professional card and they didn't even make money off of it. That was the problem with vega was that they didn't make money off the cards because they were so expensive to produce. 

 

It was more that they had to use very heavy duty hardware relative to the performance they where getting, rather than the raw expense of the hardware.

[Bombastinator]

2 hours ago, pythonmegapixel said:

Oh no, you're not a Brit. You can't possibly understand the societal implications to us of cutting our tea consumption

I can speak to this only a tiny bit, but there is actually special equipment just for brewing tea in ww2 british tanks and there being special stuff in british military parlance involving what was simply known as “brew up” which in other militaries involve a particular way a tank is destroyed by cooking off ammunition, but in britian refers to making tea.  Try removing coffee from the US navy and see what happens. And their coffee is famously terrible.

[CarlBar]

1 minute ago, Bombastinator said:

I can speak to this only a tiny bit, but there is actually special equipment just for brewing tea in ww2 british tanks and there being special stuff in british military parlance involving what was simply known as “brew up” which in other militaries involve a particular way a tank is destroyed by cooking off ammunition, but in britian refers to making tea.  Try removing coffee from the US navy and see what happens. And their coffee is famously terrible.

 

They still have said equipment. It's known as a boiling vessel in technical parlance. In the Challenger 2 at least it's even position such that it protects the ammunition from shrapnel if somthing does get in the tank.