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Honest question, how many GPU's are in the world just sitting there mining crypto all day?

It's got to be some absurd number by now if they're sucking up as much power as 3-5 small countries.

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A lot. Hard to estimate with the huge variety that you have out there all with different hashrates.

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2 hours ago, dilpickle said:

Surely in the millions.

I would imagine there's that many alone in some countries. Nvidia shipped almost 10 million cards branded for desktops in the fourth quarter of 2020 alone.

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I would imagine in countries such as china where they have easy access due to hardware production being local, there's probably at least a hundred million just sitting around mining crypto all day.

 

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46 minutes ago, WillOfTheLand said:

I would imagine there's that many alone in some countries. Nvidia shipped almost 10 million cards branded for desktops in the fourth quarter of 2020 alone.

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I would imagine in countries such as china where they have easy access due to hardware production being local, there's probably at least a hundred million just sitting around mining crypto all day.

 

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You're making the big assumption that almost all graphics cards sold are being used for mining, and all evidence we got right now is that only a small percentage is used for that.

Nvidia estimates that about 2 to 6% of their revenue is from mining.

 

More than 50% of Nvidia's revenue is from graphics cards, so even if we count on the high side only about 10% of those 41.5 million cards are used for mining. That means it's about 4.1 million if we are making high estimations. 

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16 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

You're making the big assumption that almost all graphics cards sold are being used for mining, and all evidence we got right now is that only a small percentage is used for that.

Nvidia estimates that about 2 to 6% of their revenue is from mining.

 

More than 50% of Nvidia's revenue is from graphics cards, so even if we count on the high side only about 10% of those 41.5 million cards are used for mining. That means it's about 4.1 million if we are making high estimations. 

Nvidia is referring to just their mining line of cards when they say that, but to continue on your thought, 4.1 million from just that year alone, you're not taking into consideration the many facilities from years prior that are likely full decked out with the cards they had bought prior. That 4.1 million would be just what has been added on top in the last year.

 

Also nvidia moved 31 million, the 41 million is total, not just them.

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5 minutes ago, WillOfTheLand said:

Nvidia is referring to just their mining line of cards when they say that, but to continue on your thought, 4.1 million from just that year alone, you're not taking into consideration the many facilities from years prior that are likely full decked out with the cards they had bought prior. That 4.1 million would be just what has been added on top in the last year.

Yes, and?

It's still just a small percentage of the total GPUs sold. I think it's fairly safe to argue that mining has become more popular today than it was let's say two years ago, so the further back we go in time the smaller the percentage of GPUs sold are used for mining.

If it's 10% of GPUs sold today, it might be 8% last year, and 5% the year before. Etc... Numbers pulled out of my butt but you get the point.

 

People are dramatically overestimating how many GPUs are used for mining compared to gaming and datacenters. It's a pretty small drop on the ocean of GPUs sold.

The reason why it is estimated to use so much power (which I also think people underestimate how much power other things use) is because there are a small number of GPUs (relatively speaking) being run at close to 100% load 24/7.

One GPU sold for mining will use as much power as something like 8 cards used for gaming.

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6 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Yes, and?

It's still just a small percentage of the total GPUs sold. I think it's fairly safe to argue that mining has become more popular today than it was let's say two years ago, so the further back we go in time the smaller the percentage of GPUs sold are used for mining.

If it's 10% of GPUs sold today, it might be 8% last year, and 5% the year before. Etc... Numbers pulled out of my butt but you get the point.

 

People are dramatically overestimating how many GPUs are used for mining compared to gaming and datacenters. It's a pretty small drop on the ocean of GPUs sold.

The reason why it is estimated to use so much power (which I also think people underestimate how much power other things use) is because there are a small number of GPUs (relatively speaking) being run at close to 100% load 24/7.

One GPU sold for mining will use as much power as something like 8 cards used for gaming.

You can't really pull datacenters into this, as these are cards are earmarked for desktop, not datacenter, and nvidia has a specific line of datacenter cards. As I imagine others do as well.

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10 hours ago, WillOfTheLand said:

It's got to be some absurd number by now if they're sucking up as much power as 3-5 small countries.

Considering how few of them are showing up in the Steam Survey, I'd say the vast majority of GTX 10xx, RTX 20xx and RTX 30xx GPU's that were headed to retail wound up being put into Ethereum mining rigs, the cards at the top of the survey are all unprofitable to mine on.

 

 

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I do want to point out that the only GPU that is showing up in OEM systems (eg Dell, HP) is the RTX 3070, which explains it's position on the list.

 

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So pretty much no 3090's or 3060's found their way into gamer PC's. They're hovering around the 4th gen Intel iGPU's for distribution.

 

Now also understand that Steam doesn't represent 100% of gamers, there are likely GTX's in business workstations that need the render/CUDA power but don't require a Quadro. Likewise you don't see Quadro parts on the list, and I'm sure those parts haven't disappeared into the void.

 

Honestly, I'd hazard to guess that the Steam survey is curated for clarity and doesn't count parts that are infrequently used.

 

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Just now, dilpickle said:

I can't imagine anyone is mining with a 3090.

@Moonzy shall prove you wrong (I believe they have at least 2 3090s, possibly more)

elephants

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Just now, dilpickle said:

I'm talking about dedicated mining operations.

Dedicated mining rig.

- 2 3090's

- 3 3060 Ti's

elephants

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Just now, dilpickle said:

This thread is about mining farms

Quote

Honest question, how many GPU's are in the world just sitting there mining crypto all day?

Does not specify mining farms or not, just whether or not they mine crypto all day.

1 minute ago, dilpickle said:

not one crazy person.

Oh, there's more than one person doing this.

If I could, I would.

elephants

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Just now, dilpickle said:

And why can't you

I'm in high school and don't have the time or money to get started.

elephants

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11 hours ago, FakeKGB said:

Remember, GPUs are not the only thing that can mine crypto. ASICs are probably the majority of worldwide crypto mining power draw.

Ethereum doesn't run on ASIC and it is the what the miners are buying gpus to mine  nowadays. 

Sudo make me a sandwich 

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2 minutes ago, FakeKGB said:

I'm in high school and don't have the time or money to get started.

Exactly my point. A 3090 costs twice as much as a 3080 and gives maybe 5% performance improvement. No one who was serious about profits would even consider it.

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Just now, dilpickle said:

Exactly my point. A 3090 costs twice as much as a 3080 and gives maybe 5% performance improvement. No one who was serious about profits would even consider it.

Except that we live in a time where it's hard to get them. If you were offered a choice between a 3090 or no card at all for mining, which would you choose?

elephants

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50 minutes ago, dilpickle said:

A 3090 costs twice as much as a 3080 and gives maybe 5% performance improvement.

Clearly you never did your research before saying your numbers

 

3080: 103MH/s at 240W

3090: 122MH/s* at 310W

 

* If VRAM isn't overheating, only few models can achieve this

 

It costs 20-30% more than a 3080 here

Mining is ~20% better, but it's a huge headache so I wouldn't recommend it

 

But I can see people running ANY GPU that's profitable atm

Because 3080 are literally out of stock

-sigh- feeling like I'm being too negative lately

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50 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

Clearly you never did your research before saying your numbers

 

3080: 103MH/s at 240W

3090: 122MH/s* at 310W

 

* If VRAM isn't overheating

So 8% then. My point still stands. Let me know of any mining farms you know that have bought 3090s.

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8 hours ago, dilpickle said:

I'm talking about dedicated mining operations.

Well there's at least one person who used 3090's

 

 

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Here's some real numbers.

 

The total Ethereum network hash rate as of April 16 2021 is 514,120 GH/s

https://etherscan.io/chart/hashrate

 

There are few ASICS available for Ethash, so for simplicity I'll assume the entire Ethereum network is running on consumer GPUs. Of course there are a variety of GPU models out there but again for simplicity I'll assume they're all an older mid-range model, I'll pick an RTX 2070 which yields 36.77 MH/s.

https://minerstat.com/hardware/nvidia-rtx-2070

 

Simple division yields an estimate of 13.982 million GPUs mining Ethereum on April 16 2021. 

 

There are other mineable coins out there, but given Ethereum's current popularity and the GPU's affinity for Ethash, I think it is safer to assume the vast majority of GPU's that are mining are mining Ethereum. 

 

EDIT: Here's some estimated power consumption numbers.

 

13.982 million RTX 2070s at 156 W each, running 24/7 for a year consume ~19,100 GWh/yr

 

This puts the entire Ethereum network power consumption at #72 in ranking by countries and ~0.08% of the world'd electrical power consumption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption

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