Not you too! - Miners looking towards gaming laptops powered by NVIDIA's Ampere GPUs for Ethereum

[Middcore]

7 minutes ago, atxcyclist said:

I made a perfectly fine distinction several posts back. You seem to have taken it personally even though I separated your use case from others, as you are the outlier. Your attempt to belittle my use case, even though I'm not contributing to a shortage in any way since I've not purchased but one new card in five years, falls flat as well. Don't shit on people for wanting to have enjoyment during this shitty time, I never singled you out or said anything about folding.

 

This forum has an ignore feature and I'm using it, bye.

 

I know you won't see this, but: I never belittled your use case, game to your heart's content. I merely pointed out how arguing that reducing the available pool of GPU's purely for "selfish" purposes is flawed, since it forces you to keep making arbitrary distinctions on how many GPU's one is allowed to use purely for their own benefit, and make other caveats and carve-outs so you don't indict yourself with your own words.

 

Anyway, I can't say I'm going to miss stimulating discourse with someone who avowedly "does not give a shit" about facts. Stay mad, I know you will, but remember that if ever you just can't bear gaming on your tired old 1060 anymore and decide to take up counted cross-stitch to pass the time during lockdown instead, folding@home will welcome your contributions. 

 

 

[EL02]

2 hours ago, atxcyclist said:

If the card has an MSRP of $429 then it should be sold for $429.

lol nice one

[SteveGrabowski0]

On 2/6/2021 at 9:38 AM, D13H4RD said:

Indeed it has. So much so that it would actually be better to just buy a PS5 if and when you can find one that's not price-gouged to hell.

Just imagine if someone publishes an exploit on PS5 or XBox Series X to allow you to run unsigned code and then use the consoles to mine too. Won't even have the console option to evade the cancer that is ethereum in that case.

[Zodiark1593]

16 minutes ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

Just imagine if someone publishes an exploit on PS5 or XBox Series X to allow you to run unsigned code and then use the consoles to mine too. Won't even have the console option to evade the cancer that is ethereum in that case.

Inb4 Eth miner comes to iPhones and M1 devices. 

[D13H4RD]

@atxcyclistDid you seriously just lump Folding@Home and mining in the same pool?

 

Because that is plain stupid. The former is used for actual scientific research and it has actually been used to better study the SARS-CoV-2 virion in order to combat the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It is actually using the sheer compute power of your system for things that you know for sure are helping the world, so I see absolutely no problem in using a gaming system or a secondary system for the purpose of a Folding rig.

 

And the 1060 being shit for gaming? What? It's not a really powerful card but it's heck a lot better for a lot of games than you're describing. I used a notebook 1060 since 2017 until mid-2020 when I built a desktop (out of rage since the laptop fried the 1060). Up until it died, it performed quite well for gaming. I did have to reduce the settings a notch in a few games, but I see no problem in doing that to extend the useful life of a card. Not every game needs ultra settings.

[atxcyclist]

22 minutes ago, D13H4RD said:

@atxcyclistDid you seriously just lump Folding@Home and mining in the same pool?

 

Because that is plain stupid. The former is used for actual scientific research and it has actually been used to better study the SARS-CoV-2 virion in order to combat the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It is actually using the sheer compute power of your system for things that you know for sure are helping the world, so I see absolutely no problem in using a gaming system or a secondary system for the purpose of a Folding rig.

 

5 hours ago, atxcyclist said:

For every one of you there are dozens or hundreds of people buying GPUs up to mine cryptocurrency with, which benefits them and no one else.

 

No, I actually didn't, and have separated the two groups purposefully in this thread by mentioning mining explicitly page after page. That guy took personal offense to me complaining about miners and acted like I was talking about people folding, which I didn't. There might be a very active folding group here on LTT, but there are many times more people buying large numbers of cards to mine with than there are doing the same for folding. 

EDIT: The 1060 is considerably less powerful than the 1070, which is what I wanted back in 2016, but miners bought them all up. I wouldn't be nearly as annoyed if this wasn't the second time mining and/or some other factor had stymied my efforts to buy a relevant GPU in the last few years. 

[Blademaster91]

On 2/6/2021 at 12:12 PM, Heliian said:

Yay!  

 

Here's to hoping governments start regulating this crap.  India is at least attempting to put pressure on it.

 

Crypto currency is the biggest waste of resources, just think how much scientific computing could have been accomplished with all that hardware churning. 

I'd usually be against governments regulating sales of graphics cards, because the free market is usually a good thing, but when mid range cards cost $1000 or you just can't find one at all, and miners start buying piles of gaming laptops yeah I wouldn't have a problem with some anti-scalping laws or price regulation on hardware.

[Middcore]

49 minutes ago, atxcyclist said:

 

No, I actually didn't, and have separated the two groups purposefully in this thread by mentioning mining explicitly page after page. That guy took personal offense to me complaining about miners and acted like I was talking about people folding, which I didn't. There might be a very active folding group here on LTT, but there are many times more people buying large numbers of cards to mine with than there are doing the same for folding. 

EDIT: The 1060 is considerably less powerful than the 1070, which is what I wanted back in 2016, but miners bought them all up. I wouldn't be nearly as annoyed if this wasn't the second time mining and/or some other factor had stymied my efforts to buy a relevant GPU in the last few years. 

 

I didn't take personal offense, I pointed out that in your haste to demonize miners, you had created an ethical standard you weren't living up to yourself.

 

BTW, you had ample opportunity to upgrade from your 1060 late last summer when the first performance estimates on the 30 series came out and people were panic-selling Turing at rock-bottom prices. There were 2080 ti's going for $500 if you looked. Don't act like there's been some continuous mining boom going on inflating prices since 2016 or something. 

[D13H4RD]

2 minutes ago, Middcore said:

There were 2080 ti's going for $500 if you looked.

I'm still kicking myself for not taking advantage of it. Incredible bargain especially since many of them were still pretty new.

[SteveGrabowski0]

1 hour ago, atxcyclist said:

 

No, I actually didn't, and have separated the two groups purposefully in this thread by mentioning mining explicitly page after page. That guy took personal offense to me complaining about miners and acted like I was talking about people folding, which I didn't. There might be a very active folding group here on LTT, but there are many times more people buying large numbers of cards to mine with than there are doing the same for folding. 

EDIT: The 1060 is considerably less powerful than the 1070, which is what I wanted back in 2016, but miners bought them all up. I wouldn't be nearly as annoyed if this wasn't the second time mining and/or some other factor had stymied my efforts to buy a relevant GPU in the last few years. 

Damn I don't remember miners buying hardware up in 2016. I think that was just straight up excitement at getting 980 Ti performance with 2GB extra VRAM for $450 with the 1070 (lol at that fake $380 MSRP). I remember 2013-14 LiteCoin mining being a huge thing and AMD overproducing Hawaii to meet demand and when LiteCoin dropped in value and started being unprofitable to mine on gpus AMD was stuck with a bunch of R9 290 and R9 290x to blowout at ridiculous low prices. I remember R9 290 was $200 to $230 in say Nov 2014, would be like getting an RTX 3070 today for $230. Then early 2018 eth mining fucked the market over again and was probably a big reason Nvidia was able to get away with charging so much for Turing. Same shit will probably happen with Lovelace thanks to this fucking bubble. About ready to write off PC gaming, it was already becoming a money pit with Turing and then with AMD jacking up the prices of their cpus but JFC this eth boom is going to take us to an even higher normal for gpu prices even after this bubble pops.

[atxcyclist]

27 minutes ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

Damn I don't remember miners buying hardware up in 2016. I think that was just straight up excitement at getting 980 Ti performance with 2GB extra VRAM for $450 with the 1070 (lol at that fake $380 MSRP). I remember 2013-14 LiteCoin mining being a huge thing and AMD overproducing Hawaii to meet demand and when LiteCoin dropped in value and started being unprofitable to mine on gpus AMD was stuck with a bunch of R9 290 and R9 290x to blowout at ridiculous low prices. I remember R9 290 was $200 to $230 in say Nov 2014, would be like getting an RTX 3070 today for $230. Then early 2018 eth mining fucked the market over again and was probably a big reason Nvidia was able to get away with charging so much for Turing. Same shit will probably happen with Lovelace thanks to this fucking bubble. About ready to write off PC gaming, it was already becoming a money pit with Turing and then with AMD jacking up the prices of their cpus but JFC this eth boom is going to take us to an even higher normal for gpu prices even after this bubble pops.

Local retailers were absolutely empty at the time. It took me five visits to the local Fry's before they had something other than an 8800GS or GT 710 on the shelves to purchase. Best Buy never got anything in stock the entire time I looked.

 

I've been building gaming systems since around 1997, and I've seen a lot of ups and downs. I saved-up a lot of money while working in high school to buy very high-end hardware back then, and thankfully unlike now that stuff became completely useless as new APIs and system requirements skyrocketed with the release of every new generation of hardware. Even though I dislike my current cards performance, it's serviceable enough that I don't just completely nope out of the hobby.

 

I threw down $449 on a GeForce 4600 Ti my senior year in high school in '02, I love gaming. I don't drop a comparable level of coin on it now, so buying a $399 card for $1000 is very much not something I want. If I had any other options during lockdown I'd just do something else, and that is a large factor in my annoyance. The only thing I can safely do I cannot really enjoy.

 

Many industries and retailers impose limits on purchases, I have done it myself in places I've worked and managed. This fix is easy and probably possible with the point of sale and inventory systems all big computer retailers have, they just won't do it. In the end retailers would make more money having GPU inventory available to people building full systems. Instead, they're losing out on all those potential processor/MOBO/RAM/case and etc. sales by letting some asshat buy 12 graphics cards in a month and denying the system builders GPU inventory. Those would-be builders are going to put it off or blow it off completely, and are going to remember which retailers were truly shit in this time (like I will) and not patronize them anymore.

[Beskamir]

On 2/6/2021 at 8:09 PM, leadeater said:

SETI@Home (1999), Folding@Home (2000), BOINC (2002) etc etc all disagree. Cryptocurrencies came after distributed computing not before.

Of course they did, but last I checked they don't compensate their contributors and given capitalism is the dominating economic system on this rock compensation is often necessary for people to contribute. It sucks I know but the vast majority of people would rather have their computer turned off than wearing out their hardware and using up their electricity if they're not being compensated for it.

[SteveGrabowski0]

18 minutes ago, atxcyclist said:

I've been building gaming systems since around 1997,

Haha, 97 was when I did my first PC build too. This is by far the worst I have ever seen the PC market. Probably going to be years until I do any kind of significant PC upgrade with the value consoles offer right now (if you can land one, luckily got a PS5 ordered at MSRP a few days ago).

 

Don't really have any allegiance to PC gaming, have jumped between console and PC many times over the last 30 years based on what was the better value, and PC isn't nearly as appealing now as it was in the 90s when you had tons of incredible games that you either couldn't play on console or were really bad knockoffs on console.

[leadeater]

47 minutes ago, Beskamir said:

Of course they did, but last I checked they don't compensate their contributors and given capitalism is the dominating economic system on this rock compensation is often necessary for people to contribute. It sucks I know but the vast majority of people would rather have their computer turned off than wearing out their hardware and using up their electricity if they're not being compensated for it.

But crypto hasn't allowed and still does not allow scientific distributed computing, what you said was simply not correct. Folding@Home was one of the largest aggregate of computational power (Talking Top500 supercomputers here) before COVID and then because of it grew to be the largest/fastest. Now I know distributed computing is far more limited in what you can do compared to an actual supercomputer but the point is Folding@Home was huge before and is still huge now and crypto has had nothing to do with that. Zero miners are doing anything other than mining, miners defined as people purchasing specific for mining.

 

I can run my GPUs for any workload I like, if I choose Folding@Home I get nothing for it and expect nothing for it. Same goes for BOINC. The people active in the Folding/BOINC communities (outside of LTT included) are heavily opposed to monetary compensation, those using services that pay you to contribute (they exist) are the slim minority compared to those contributing completely voluntarily.

 

Your assuming even with some kind of compensation that people would contribute, well that just isn't the case. More likely would but the compensation would never be on the scale of cryptocurrencies because those thus far are actually not economical so therefor not viable for scientific institutions and organizations to compensate people with of similar value, they would literally go bankrupt in a year.

 

Would those people either

1. Join a distributed computing effort at a net negative cost
2. Mine cryptocurrencies at a net positive cost 

Those people will choose number 2 every time therefore compensation is insignificant and so your statement was not correct and will continue to be not correct for a good distant future.

 

Edit:

Also as a person who works at one I know the hourly cost of access to our national supercomputer service, suffice to say you're better off mining cryptocurrency. 

[Moonzy]

8 hours ago, atxcyclist said:

I had to buy a worse card than I wanted  in 2016 because of mining, it was all that was available and my then 2012 card was already not pulling its weight. Mining has kept me from buying a good card twice now.

You have my condolences because I had to buy 2x 1070 at 1.5x the MSRP back then too

I drove 600km to another country to get just one 1070, I was that insane for one

 

But I used mining as a tool to recoup the cost of the more expensive hardware, because when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade

Except that this lemonade actually benefited me and allowed me to continue upgrading my PC over the years

 

I understand why most people paint negative light on miners because of the media, but I urge you to try and take a few deep breathe and look at it as a tool for people with a computer to earn back, if not all, at least part of your investment into tech.

[Moonzy]

2 hours ago, atxcyclist said:

In the end retailers would make more money having GPU inventory available to people building full systems

My local retailer told me I have to buy a full system just to get a 3080

I'm fine with that, it's still profitable even when I have to spend extra on the other parts, and many other miners will likely think the same, as evident by the topic of this thread, people buying essentially full systems (laptops) just to mine.

 

Forcing a full system purchase is just a speed bump, not a full road block, imo

[AndreiArgeanu]

Cool, maybe I'll buy one of these 1-2 years later at a 1/3 the price and replace the battery.

[mwagen]

2 hours ago, Moonzy said:

I understand why most people paint negative light on miners because of the media, but I urge you to try and take a few deep breathe and look at it as a tool for people with a computer to earn back, if not all, at least part of your investment into tech.

No, you don't get it at all. You and your little hobby mining rig are barely relevant to the discussion and taking the hate way too personally.

 

You can't expect me to believe that miners buying up multiple cards at a time isn't contributing to massive shortages. I've yet to see newegg with anything in stock. The incentive for a gamer to buy a new gpu is the better visual quality but the incentives for a miner are much higher, and you just know they're the type of people who will elbow their way to the front of the line to buy as many as they can. 

[Moonzy]

Just now, mwagen said:

You can't expect me to believe that miners buying up multiple cards at a time isn't contributing to massive shortages.

I never said miners aren't causing the shortage, far from it

I even said that miners are the main reason why 3060ti and 3080 are unavailable in my market from my observation and deduction, though some people said correlation isn't causation -shrug-

 

2 minutes ago, mwagen said:

I've yet to see newegg with anything in stock. The incentive for a gamer to buy a new gpu is the better visual quality but the incentives for a miner are much higher, and you just know they're the type of people who will elbow their way to the front of the line to buy as many as they can

Maybe the first world countries have people rich enough to pay scalper prices so GPU are still flying off the shelves

In my country, I could literally just go to my online retailer now and pay $1000 for a 3070 right now, because not many people are willing to pay such prices for the GPU, but I am.

 

It's less of an elbowing when there's no queue.

 

4 minutes ago, mwagen said:

You and your little hobby mining rig are barely relevant to the discussion and taking the hate way too personally

It's something I'm semi-passionate about because i see it as an opportunity to allow me to indulge in my tech hobby, so I guess you'd be right in saying that I'm upset when people say bad things about it, especially when they're being very hypocrite in almost every reason they can throw at it.

 

I'm still waiting for someone to come up with a good reason why not to mine, I'll stop mining if that's the case

The closest argument is global warming which I very much agree with, but that holds very little water when there's much larger industries that are producing much more greenhouse gases and people are okay with it.

It doesn't make mining any less harmful than it is but it definitely is weird that people are only targeting mining, maybe due to it affecting them personally in other ways.

[mwagen]

13 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

I never said miners aren't causing the shortage, far from it

That wasn't directed at you. I'm just getting sick of people trying to minimize the effect that mining has on gpu availability. You cannot deny that miners and gamers are two very different people. Somebody building or upgrading a gaming pc is likely younger, a casual techy with a limited budget. But the guy building a mining rig can afford 6+ 3080s and you just know he's determined enough to camp out in front of a store or be up all hours of the night scouring the internet or using a bot because that's just how these people are. And when gamers get frustrated that the card they wanted was sold out seconds after it was in stock they're given the supply 'n demand lecture as if that's supposed to mollify the situation. What a gpu is ultimately used for is tangential to the discussion surrounding availability because if miners were only buying one card at a time then these threads wouldn't keep popping up, but here we are again looking at photos of rooms filled with new hardware all belonging to one person.

[Moonzy]

12 minutes ago, mwagen said:

I'm just getting sick of people trying to minimize the effect that mining has on gpu availability

If anyone said miners aren't contributing to the GPU shortage, they're delusional

Everyone who bought a GPU is contributing to it.

 

But seeing how AMD's CPU market share for 2020Q4 dropped by 0.7% even though they "released" a new product and sold out virtually all 3000 and 5000 series CPU, you have to imagine how big the demand for gaming rig is in the past months.

[Silver.G]

I was looking forward for a rtx 3060 laptop this year

[Blademaster91]

1 hour ago, Moonzy said:

It's something I'm semi-passionate about because i see it as an opportunity to allow me to indulge in my tech hobby, so I guess you'd be right in saying that I'm upset when people say bad things about it, especially when they're being very hypocrite in almost every reason they can throw at it.

Well you're expecting everyone to be positive about it while telling everyone to go buy multiple $1000 GPU's?

For example see the Steam hardware survey, most people are on 10 series cards, which were all cheap used before the mining boom. The problem I have are miners telling people "just go buy GPUs lol" while there aren't any and I refuse to pay a scalper or retailer driving up the costs because that only encourages Nvidia to keep raising the prices even further. It's worse enough Nvidia has been increasing prices since the GTX 10 series.

1 hour ago, Moonzy said:

I'm still waiting for someone to come up with a good reason why not to mine, I'll stop mining if that's the case

I think there was a really good reason on the first page of this thread, if this keeps up it would kill off PC gaming for a lot of people. I tried watching the stock trackers, signing up for stock queues, and nothing at all has come in stock.

I could care less about the 30 series cards, and stock on RX 6000 cards is pretty much nothing because of TSMC supply, and I don't plan to upgrade any time soon as the prices only get out of reach of the average PC hobbyist that just wants to buy a single GPU to enjoy games with.

 

[Moonzy]

30 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

Well you're expecting everyone to be positive about it while telling everyone to go buy multiple $1000 GPU's?

I'm saying that there are ways to justify the costs if you do want to buy a $1000 3060ti.

it's that price for a reason, so look at the reason and find out a way to use it to your advantage

That's not a false way of thinking things, in my opinion, that's how I got by in 2017 GPU shortage.

 

30 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

The problem I have are miners telling people "just go buy GPUs lol" while there aren't any and I refuse to pay a scalper or retailer driving up the costs because that only encourages Nvidia to keep raising the prices even further.

IDK bout your location as I've mentioned but there are many GPU for sale for my place, just at absurdly high mark up

 

But yea, Nvidia and retailers will jack up the price of GPUs no doubt, but at this point you not buying a GPU probably have little impact on that already

But I guess every little counts

I don't blame Nvidia or retailers for jacking up the price to reflect the true value of the product, but I sure am annoyed by it as well, but it is what it is, and I'm still paying $1000 for a GPU if it makes sense for me.

 

30 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

if this keeps up it would kill off PC gaming for a lot of people

As much as people saying mining should be killed off, I can't be sympathetic towards those people, nor am I obligated to if I'm being brutally honest.

 

I wish mining could co-exist with gaming, as mining could be a great tool for gamers too, but some people are too blinded by the hate towards it to see that, and that's okay, they do them.

I still remember buying steam games worth several tens of dollars with few dollars worth of electricity, it's great.

[Kisai]

4 hours ago, Moonzy said:

 

I don't blame Nvidia or retailers for jacking up the price to reflect the true value of the product, but I sure am annoyed by it as well, but it is what it is, and I'm still paying $1000 for a GPU if it makes sense for me.

 

That's completely misplaced.

 

The value of the GPU is "not what the market will bear" when the scarcity is caused by two different cesspools trying to corner the market on it, and the retailers being unable to charge these jerks full price because they were committed to selling them at the price people could afford. This is why ticket scalping still happens, a bunch of greedy awful people see a popular thing, see no risk in buying all the inventory and it artificially blows the demand out of the water when fair value of it was in fact the suggested retail price or lower.

 

If every product was being scalped right now, every single item in the grocery store last would be gone for the last 12 months as people initially horded things like toilet paper and canned food (indeed last march as quarantines were being announced, every single box of pasta and canned food item was gone, and now today absolutely everything is 25% more expensive at the retailers than it was last year.) Things that were 5.99 are now 7.99. We've literately lost 25% of our spending power over one year.

 

So yes, the people buying these for mining, and the people buying these to scalp them do not deserve any sympathy. They know they're being evil, and have no qualms about being so. It's the kind of thing that government regulation is intended to stop as it results in a even more ewaste had the miners not been the driving force for "shucking" hardware to get the gpu's.