Promising return of the market, or ploy to supply more GPUs to miners?

[dragonhart6505]

4 minutes ago, shea99 said:

Problem is there is no incentive for retailers to limit purchases per customer

Could work for online retail, maybe not as much at B&M stores. That would bring me to the sites at least.

Again, I'm probably speaking on the minority side of things but it's only because it MAKES SENSE on the consumer side. Businesses want money and I get that. But if consumers aren't getting product they turn their backs to the retailer and stocks suffer.

It's not up to us, the consumer, and our cries for normalcy get drowned out by registers going *DING*

[mariushm]

36 minutes ago, dragonhart6505 said:

Two weeks or a month of a limited buy option of 3 cards max at a time at MSRP could give gamers enough time to pop in, check out and satisfy for a small time. That's all we need...JUST ENOUGH time. This could work for online retailers if they have enough supply in-house, maybe B&M could get on board too with a slightly larger card limit of like 5-10 still giving average consumers ability to buy

A miner can set up a small company / computer store within a couple of weeks and then buy tens to hundreds of cards from a distributor, maybe with other parts like memory and cpus just to look genuine. He can tell sell the cards to himself for minimum profit and use them for mining.

 

No, i honestly believe offering a better option for miners would be solution..

 

what i would do ..just some ideas to make cards cheaper to make and more attractive to miners

 

pci-e x1 or x4 connector (no need for more than x1 and the cards could be used directly in existing x1 slots)

no power drawn from slot ( usually it's 3.3v and 12v and extra 12v from pci-e power connectors) - get all power from a power connector, and maybe make it not pci-e 6 pin or 8 pin (see below)

a special connector (or reuse a usb connector) so that you can either plug the card into a regular pci-e x1 slot or use a tiny pci-e x1 riser card and a usb cable (or some similarly mass produced cable) to connect card to mb  ... since there's no power taken from mb, no need for pci-e riser pcb with x16 slot and dc-dc converters to produce 3.3v for the card.

make them a size between half height and full height , and design  the bracket to allow either plugging the card directly in the slot, or to have the card sit an inch or so above the slot, allowing to use risers with the card while still having the card screwed to a case (save money on custom rig)

 

use  a custom power connector and power the cards from 18v .. 24v ... allows to use server grade 24v 2000-2200w to power multiple cards with less cables - with higher voltage and lower currents, you can design vrm with maybe cheaper mosfets or use fewer phases and you can potentially make the vrm more efficient (produce less heat)

At the same time, since miners won't need to buy powerful 12v based power supplies, the prices of 850w and higher power supplies will go down or there will be more cheaper 500-650w power supplies.

make the cards 1.8- 1.9x units and design heatsink in such a way to easily screw 2 x 80 / 92 / 120 mm x 15mm fans on them, AND have a bracket or something at  the end so that when you have 2 or 3 cards close together , you can use screw a fan between 2-3 cards to push air through the fins and between the cards

lock the bios

set the voltage to a fixed value like 1v for example, set the memory frequency and latency to something miners would like and lock them there. Predictable power consumption, no overclocking, you can optimize vrm well, you know how much heat the cards will make etc

have a single DVI connector (no hdmi because you'd pay licenses etc, no vga because the chips don't have ramdac and the analogue shit on them anymore) and maybe lock the maximum resolution to 720p from bios, so that they won't be attractive to regular users, yet still have a convenient output for testing the cards if needed.

ship packs of 3 cards with risers and with power full high quality fan in case user wants to cool them from back to front like in the picture.

 

since they don't have to respect the maximum 300w per card, they could make the cards longer and use a pci-e x1 to 2-4 x pci-e x1 bridge chip to put up to 4 rx 570 chips with 4 GB memory each for example on a single card, with proper tuning (lower voltage, locked cpu frequency at the sweetspot) they could get each to use around  100w so you'd have 3 x 400w cards  ... if so, bundle a  24v 1500w psu as well in the package for more profit.

 

 

here's something i quickly drew in paint

 

 

 

 

[dragonhart6505]

9 minutes ago, mariushm said:

A miner can set up a small company / computer store within a couple of weeks and then buy tens to hundreds of cards from a distributor, maybe with other parts like memory and cpus just to look genuine. He can tell sell the cards to himself for minimum profit and use them for mining.

 

No, i honestly believe offering a better option for miners would be solution..

 

what i would do ..just some ideas to make cards cheaper to make and more attractive to miners

 

pci-e x1 or x4 connector (no need for more than x1 and the cards could be used directly in existing x1 slots)

no power drawn from slot ( usually it's 3.3v and 12v and extra 12v from pci-e power connectors) - get all power from a power connector, and maybe make it not pci-e 6 pin or 8 pin (see below)

a special connector (or reuse a usb connector) so that you can either plug the card into a regular pci-e x1 slot or use a tiny pci-e x1 riser card and a usb cable (or some similarly mass produced cable) to connect card to mb  ... since there's no power taken from mb, no need for pci-e riser pcb with x16 slot and dc-dc converters to produce 3.3v for the card.

make them a size between half height and full height , and design  the bracket to allow either plugging the card directly in the slot, or to have the card sit an inch or so above the slot, allowing to use risers with the card while still having the card screwed to a case (save money on custom rig)

 

use  a custom power connector and power the cards from 18v .. 24v ... allows to use server grade 24v 2000-2200w to power multiple cards with less cables - with higher voltage and lower currents, you can design vrm with maybe cheaper mosfets or use fewer phases and you can potentially make the vrm more efficient (produce less heat)

At the same time, since miners won't need to buy powerful 12v based power supplies, the prices of 850w and higher power supplies will go down or there will be more cheaper 500-650w power supplies.

make the cards 1.8- 1.9x units and design heatsink in such a way to easily screw 2 x 80 / 92 / 120 mm x 15mm fans on them, AND have a bracket or something at  the end so that when you have 2 or 3 cards close together , you can use screw a fan between 2-3 cards to push air through the fins and between the cards

lock the bios

set the voltage to a fixed value like 1v for example, set the memory frequency and latency to something miners would like and lock them there. Predictable power consumption, no overclocking, you can optimize vrm well, you know how much heat the cards will make etc

have a single DVI connector (no hdmi because you'd pay licenses etc, no vga because the chips don't have ramdac and the analogue shit on them anymore) and maybe lock the maximum resolution to 720p from bios, so that they won't be attractive to regular users, yet still have a convenient output for testing the cards if needed.

 

 

here's something i quickly drew in paint

 

 

 

 

Maybe you weren't reading ahead. The idea is probably already in production to help, but we don't think it will. If cryptomining dies out these cards have no worth and no purpose. That's why dedicated Graphics Cards are more beneficial to miners because they can just resell the cards if this happens and make something back on them.

Check Linus' video on ASICs from yesterday. This is basically what you're talking about but on a smaller scale operation because of the cost associated with buying them.

Even if they output a display just for testing, the chip in it wouldn't be worth using because it's meant for mining. You certainly couldn't game on it. That would also require a whole dedicated driver for it and AMDs site is already a mess for finding drivers.

[mariushm]

3 minutes ago, dragonhart6505 said:

Maybe you weren't reading ahead. The idea is probably already in production to help, but we don't think it will. If cryptomining dies out these cards have no worth and no purpose. That's why dedicated Graphics Cards are more beneficial to miners because they can just resell the cards if this happens and make something back on them.

Check Linus' video on ASICs from yesterday. This is basically what you're talking about but on a smaller scale operation because of the cost associated with buying them

All the above is with the idea of reducing manufacturing costs, to sell a mining card cheaper than a gaming card. If the mining cards will be substantially cheaper than gaming cards, then miners may buy them

All the above suggestions should make the cards cheaper to make and provide more value to miners (cheaper vrms, cheaper heatsinks, mass produced 80/92/120mm fans, no need to buy separate risers, cheaper for miners to source 24v power supplies instead of buying regular 1000w+ power supplies that are expensive)

 

Also if mining dies, these "mining" cards would still be usable as accelerators for rendering videos in Premiere, vegas etc, or hardware encoders for streaming on twitch / youtube ... they're basically OpenCL or Cuda based so they'll still work

Unlike ASICs, they don't use proprietary connections or languages and aren't single purpose, specially made just for a single coin algorithm.

 

My argument is that right now, the mining cards are just regular cards without video connectors or with just a vga connector, and maybe slightly beefed up VRM. Otherwise, they use the same mass produced heatsinks, same everything. 

There could be more done to make them more attractive to miners and more power efficient and so on, but companies probably don't want to pay engineer hours to redesign circuit boards and retooling to make custom heatsinks and all that.

[dragonhart6505]

1 minute ago, mariushm said:

All the above is with the idea of reducing manufacturing costs, to sell a mining card cheaper than a gaming card. If the mining cards will be substantially cheaper than gaming cards, then miners may buy them

All the above suggestions should make the cards cheaper to make and provide more value to miners (cheaper vrms, cheaper heatsinks, mass produced 80/92/120mm fans, no need to buy separate risers, cheaper for miners to source 24v power supplies instead of buying regular 1000w+ power supplies that are expensive)

 

Then you're shorting the supply chain for consumer cards because you'd have to have an on-par or better mining efficiency than a gaming card to make the purchase worthwhile to the miners. You're also not solving the then flood of used and probably burnt out cards that would hurt the bargain hunters

[mariushm]

Just now, dragonhart6505 said:

Then you're shorting the supply chain for consumer cards because you'd have to have an on-par or better mining efficiency than a gaming card to make the purchase worthwhile to the miners. You're also not solving the then flood of used and probably burnt out cards that would hurt the bargain hunters

Not necessarily.

 

You could have a gaming card running at 1300 Mhz and higher voltage and with overclocking options sold at 300$  and you could have a 200$ mining card running at 1000 Mhz but lower voltage (for better efficiency) with let's say 95% of the performance of the desktop card.

 

A miner can spend 2100$ to buy 7 gaming cards and have 700% performance, or they can spend 2000$ to buy 10 cards and 950% performance but maybe with 10-20% more power consumption.  So for 100$  less, they get around 2 video cards worth of performance extra (after substracting additional power costs)

 

The miner will also save money by using a single 24v power supply to power let's say 10 cards instead of having to use 2 x 1000w or 3 x 850w 12v regular desktop power supplies to power the cards.

 

If the price of the mining card is low enough, miners may be motivated enough to buy these even if the performance of individual cards is lower and the power consumption when you add all the cards is more.

[dragonhart6505]

5 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Not necessarily.

 

You could have a gaming card running at 1300 Mhz and higher voltage and with overclocking options sold at 300$  and you could have a 200$ mining card running at 1000 Mhz but lower voltage (for better efficiency) with let's say 95% of the performance of the desktop card.

 

A miner can spend 2100$ to buy 7 gaming cards and have 700% performance, or they can spend 2000$ to buy 10 cards and 950% performance but maybe with 10-20% more power consumption.  So for 100$  less, they get around 2 video cards worth of performance extra (after substracting additional power costs)

 

The miner will also save money by using a single 24v power supply to power let's say 10 cards instead of having to use 2 x 1000w or 3 x 850w 12v regular desktop power supplies to power the cards.

 

If the price of the mining card is low enough, miners may be motivated enough to buy these even if the performance of individual cards is lower and the power consumption when you add all the cards is more.

The clock speeds improve efficiency especially on lower voltages, so what your proposing wouldn't really intrigue miners. They want all the hash they can get and sacrificing $50-60+ a month isn't profit enough for them if I had to guess. That would also hurt the crypto market itself since it takes longer to hash, leaving too much coin available to be mined and dropping it's value

[mariushm]

3 minutes ago, dragonhart6505 said:

The clock speeds improve efficiency especially on lower voltages, so what your proposing wouldn't really intrigue miners. They want all the hash they can get and sacrificing $50-60+ a month isn't profit enough for them if I had to guess. That would also hurt the crypto market itself since it takes longer to hash, leaving too much coin available to be mined and dropping it's value

It depends on the coin.

 

Ethereum is memory limited, the miners (including me)  modify the bios to tweak the memory latencies and increase frequencies (like changing DDR4 3200 Mhz CL16 to 3400 Mhz CL14) to get more hashes.  The cores often have to wait for the memory controller to read data from memory chips, so having faster gpu cores doesn't make much difference.

So instead of leaving the card at default 1244 ..1280 Mhz (for RX 570, varies from brand to brand and model to model), i've configured the card in bios to run at 1050 Mhz and this way the card is around 10-15w less power hungry and the hashrate doesn't change significantly (at least not enough for me to notice)

 

Of course, other coins do benefit from higher core speeds, that's why nVidia cards work well for monero and other coins that are yet difficult to mine using ASICs

 

As for your last statement, that's not correct. The algorithm behind the coin is in such a way designed to scale automatically the difficulty. A block is produced / found / whatever at a constant rate, one every 15-16 seconds. Due to the current difficulty, a single person would probably need around 300-500 rx 570 video cards to mine on his own a few blocks an hour.

People mine using pools where each miner with their cards mine for parts of a coin, their work is put together to successfully find blocks often and they all get a part of the block (the 3 ethereum plus transaction fees from the transactions included in the block)

If they have more cards but each slower, it doesn't matter... they get a percentage of what they contribute to finding a block, the overall hashrate matters. The only variable that changes with slower vs more powerful cards is the power consumption and cost of the hardware (motherboard.. boards with more pci-e slots are more expensive... power supplies with more pci-e connectors or more adapters)

 

There's no such thing as "leaving too much coin available to be mined" or "dropping its value" .. if someone puts online a mining farm with 1000 video cards, as soon as a block is found faster than 15-16 seconds, the algorithm scales the difficulty and next block will be found again in 15-16 seconds. If some farm drops out and it takes more time to find a block then algorithm scales difficulty down

 

You can see here the global hash rate  : https://etherscan.io/chart/hashrate

We're now at 210500 GH/s ... if you estimate a RX 570 has 25 MH/s then you're looking at  8.500.000 RX 570 video cards 

 

And you can see here how the difficulty increases with the hashrate, to keep up blocks at 15-16 seconds : https://etherscan.io/chart/difficulty ( on october 2017 they released an update, reducing difficulty but also lowering in half the reward for each block, that's why the drop in picture)

 

and the result you can see here.. average block time within 14..16s : https://www.etherchain.org/charts/blockTime

 

 

[GDRRiley]

5 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

*2014

soory couldn't remember