This mining war between companies is going to cost us

S

ShuttleLuv

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Apr 12, 2003
Messages
7,295
I've sat back and watched the whole mining process for awhile now. I stayed pretty mum on what was once a small hobby for the enthusiest that was obscure, but now that it's become kinda mainstream, it will hurt us, the consumer, in the long run bigtime.

We're already seeing evidence of this now with R290X's at $1000. Now Nvidia's Maxwell is pushing higher hash rates and those will be inflated. In my opinion this war is only going to get worse. Once higher end Nvidia parts come with good hash rates, it will literally be there is no low end. Low end will probably be $500+ and a high end at $1000 plus with maybe a mid at $750. So these quote un quote low prices, like Maxwell releasing under $200 literally mean nothing. Once the merchants get ahold of them, the prices become inflated and it's a win win for the company (Nvidia/AMD) and the merchant. We the consumer, are going to lose big time on this one imo unless both companies step up and get some serious supply going. Doubtful that will happen however, because this is simply business.
 
I agree...I was primed to grab a R9 280x awhile back, but waited. Now I am sitting here 4 months later and my jaw has hit the floor. AMD is off my buy list until these prices come back to earth.

Now I am sitting here waiting for Maxwell, and if the same thing happens I am going to be depressed and stuck with my aged 570.

I already think GPU price has gotten out of control prior to this, and now it is becoming ridiculous.

Someone out there is buying them. I am doing rain-dances that the crypto-currency bubble explodes and stays down, and I can finally upgrade my damn video card.
 
ShuttleLuv said:
I've sat back and watched the whole mining process for awhile now. I stayed pretty mum on what was once a small hobby for the enthusiest that was obscure, but now that it's become kinda mainstream, it will hurt us, the consumer, in the long run bigtime.

We're already seeing evidence of this now with R290X's at $1000. Now Nvidia's Maxwell is pushing higher hash rates and those will be inflated. In my opinion this war is only going to get worse. Once higher end Nvidia parts come with good hash rates, it will literally be there is no low end. Low end will probably be $500+ and a high end at $1000 plus with maybe a mid at $750. So these quote un quote low prices, like Maxwell releasing under $200 literally mean nothing. Once the merchants get ahold of them, the prices become inflated and it's a win win for the company (Nvidia/AMD) and the merchant. We the consumer, are going to lose big time on this one imo unless both companies step up and get some serious supply going. Doubtful that will happen however, because this is simply business.
Click to expand...

Low end will still be normal, it's not cost effective to build a mining farm with low end - low hash rate cards, as you need to dish out $ for mobos/cpus/ram/psu's to power them all for lower hash rate

EG: 1 rig with 7 290x = roughly 6.9MH on scrypt
to achieve the same 6.8MH you're going to need 24 750 Tis.

Lets look at over all cost of other hardware:

With a low end card you'll need :
3 more motherboards
3 more sticks of ram
1-2 more power supplies
3 more cpus

to achieve you could with a single rig housing 290s.

High end is where the heat will be. unfortunately there is no way around this, maybe with NV in the game there will be enough supply to fill the demand, also as BTC prices drop the ROI is getting lower, and break-even point is getting further away. I'm making half of what I was 2 months ago. At some point it will no longer be cost effective to run mining farms and mining will go back to people who already have hardware or want to do it and speculate on future coin growths.


Now if BTC price goes back to the $8-900 range, we're screwed, and everyone who wants to buy a high end video card better learn how to mine to make back the difference over MSRP.
(until ASICs at some point become viable)
 
The whole idea of getting into cryptocurrency - and ESPECIALLY in cycling between them - just because you want to generate "free" money by mining is going to keep them from being commonly accepted.

You can't just keep creating new technologies just so you can mine more coins. That is fake wealth. Of course, most official currencies (especially USD) represent fake wealth as well. But at least people don't generally cycle through currencies to try and score as much free money as they can.

I'm not a commercial business but I've sold hundreds of items between forums, Ebay, Amazon marketplace, etc. I'm sure as hell NEVER going to be accepting any of these stupid DogeCoins, AltCoins, LiteCoins, etc. If you do... you must be brain-damaged.

Besides, people are causing a significant amount (overall) of oil/gas/coal to be wasted on this BS. It has real economic cost, yet no real value.

I can't wait for the entire idea to come crashing down on these people, especially (again) the people who weren't satisfied with BitCoin.
 
Is this a NA only thing? Here in the UK GPU prices have gone down. AMD GPUs are around £100 cheaper then they were a few months ago.

Besides, people are causing a significant amount (overall) of oil/gas/coal to be wasted on this BS. It has real economic cost, yet no real value.
Click to expand...

And gaming is such a good use of oil and gas?
 
I think they will either release specific mining cards, supply will catch up with demand, or mining will crash.
 
Spazturtle said:
Is this a NA only thing? Here in the UK GPU prices have gone down. AMD GPUs are around £100 cheaper then they were a few months ago.



And gaming is such a good use of oil and gas?
Click to expand...

Pretty much yes and mostly the US where electricity is cheaper. NA prices are outrageous...
 
Spazturtle said:
And gaming is such a good use of oil and gas?
Click to expand...

Sure as hell better than mining Monopoly money, and I don't need 37 video cards to game.

It's literally the same thing as me just printing out my own worthless money and trying to spend it as if anyone gave a fuck about my stupid currency.

Bitcoin itself isn't so bad as it was first, it is sufficient, and it's had significant press coverage. Plus some stores like TD accept it. It's still got its flaws... but it's when we get down to the copycats that things get really, really awful. If you mine anything other than BitCoin, it is 100% obvious what your reason for mining is, and you don't deserve jack. If you want crypto-currencies to work out, you need to get behind one (BitCoin) and not spread out to a bunch of different currencies. If you want it to never be adopted, then go ahead and keep using crypto-currencies as if it were Linux. No unification, and thus nobody else will give a shit and it will all fail.

For the record, I don't think it should be illegal. It's stupid, but the market itself will punish you for wasting your time/electricity, without needing legal punishment.
 
Last edited:
I remember buying my 7950 a year ago for 300. Now i can easily sell it for 350. That is rediculous.
 
relatively, but its too small for viable mining.

Once high end maxwell comes out, that may change.
 
blaze15301 said:
I remember buying my 7950 a year ago for 300. Now i can easily sell it for 350. That is rediculous.
Click to expand...

I bought my 7970 for 280 and sold it for 420 :) I was also lucky enough to buy 3 290s on launch day for msrp, all of which unlocked to full 290x cards. I have yet to do any bullshit script mining.
 
y0bailey said:
I agree...I was primed to grab a R9 280x awhile back, but waited. Now I am sitting here 4 months later and my jaw has hit the floor. AMD is off my buy list until these prices come back to earth.
Click to expand...

Man I sold my 7950's and was hoping to jump on a set of 290x's.
I sold those 7950's back in Nov, Dec and I still haven't replaced them yet. :confused:


I have a dislike for this mining crap.
 
Ozymandias said:
Dude, you've had two years to get a R9 280x.
Click to expand...

He can follow ShopBLT twitter. They received stock of XFX 280X DD yesterday at $352 without tax and free shipping which works out to ~$30 above MSRP compared to buying elsewhere with tax.
 
dandragonrage said:
It's literally the same thing as me just printing out my own worthless money and trying to spend it as if anyone gave a fuck about my stupid currency.
Click to expand...
Cryptocurrencies are backed by the same thing U.S. dollars are. They're as 'real' as most national currencies these days.

Bitcoin has its uses. I don't have a single BTC to my name, but I acknowledge its value, even if I don't particularly care for the impact it's had on the GPU market. I do think that the hysteria is a bit of an overreaction, though: dedicated silicon will eventually become available for any coin that's worthwhile to mine. The impact it's had on the GPU market is a temporary effect, not a permanent one.
 
Difficulty has been increasing and the value of many of these currencies has gone down so it's certainly possible that people will be losing interest in due time... if the trends continue.

The move to 20 nm will increase performance efficiency. But I don't think the power savings can offset the increased mining difficulty.
 
IT wil lstart to de-inflate soon, Ones that wanted to have farms already have them

We are at 1/4 p[erformance / investment return ratio now that we were when the huge boom happened in november. As more countries start banning crypto currency, and bitcoin keeps getting hacked/exploited the values wil lgo down and then we will have a HUGE markete with USED cheap 290's 290x's and 280x's
 
DogsofJune said:
Man I sold my 7950's and was hoping to jump on a set of 290x's.
I sold those 7950's back in Nov, Dec and I still haven't replaced them yet. :confused:


I have a dislike for this mining crap.
Click to expand...

What a lot of people do is buy the cards at the inflated prices, then mine for about a month.. sometimes even just a few weeks, and you have easily paid off the difference from what orignal msrp was.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em
 
The war will not cost us anything!!!

If Nvidia cards can come close or equal the AMD cards(in hash rate) that means competition between the 2 unless they both artifically decrease production and create a shortage. The only thing that would change this is if a lot more people began mining. The issue is that there is no competition in the same segment. That creates shortage. When there is a shortage and the price someone is getting on a product goes up others will want more of that higher $$$ per product sold. Someone will step in to get more $$$ and that creates competition in that segment. Therefore price will stabilize then drop.

As prices begin to stabilize, sell the cards you do not want and buy the one you do.
 
Difficulties in mining is exponential, so let's hope a number of miners will soon start to give up and bring the card's price back to the ground :mad:
/If the R9 290X is still selling for it's MSRP, it would be the best card in that price range...but now the only choice is GTX 780 Ti.
 
wonderfield said:
Cryptocurrencies are backed by the same thing U.S. dollars are. They're as 'real' as most national currencies these days.

Bitcoin has its uses. I don't have a single BTC to my name, but I acknowledge its value, even if I don't particularly care for the impact it's had on the GPU market. I do think that the hysteria is a bit of an overreaction, though: dedicated silicon will eventually become available for any coin that's worthwhile to mine. The impact it's had on the GPU market is a temporary effect, not a permanent one.
Click to expand...

I'm fairly neutral to Bitcoin and only Bitcoin. I don't have any but could see myself at some point having some. My relatively negative points were specifically for all the copycats. Creating tons of different cryptocurrencies just because people want "free" "money" from mining just devalues the value of cryptocurrency as a whole, would confuse everyone but the few extremely-well-informed, and in general causes fragmentation that makes all cryptocurrency - including Bitcoin - less likely to succeed (or at the very least less impactful). Tiger accepts Bitcoin as their execs are clearly at least fairly well-informed about tech trends. Most companies, upon hearing about BitCoin, would probably be much more likely to dismiss it when they find out about DogeCoin (especially this one), AltCoin, LiteCoin, etc... They won't be able to take cryptocurrency seriously as a result. Like I said before, it'll be like Linux. Maybe it'll stay that way anyway. Who knows.

In other words, I think Bitcoin AND cryptocurrency as a whole would be taken more seriously if stupid crap like DogeCoin didn't exist.

BTW, on a tangent, I WAS a bit more anti-Bitcoin than I am now until recently, but http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/andreas-antonopoulos was a good episode. They made me a bit interested.
 
Last edited:
Until Nvidia makes cards that can mine worth a damn, this isn't a problem and Nvidia prices will stay the same as now.
 
Cool Vibrations said:
Until Nvidia makes cards that can mine worth a damn, this isn't a problem and Nvidia prices will stay the same as now.
Click to expand...


Well Maxwell is just releasing and even though it's lower end, it's the start of Nvidia's mining increase. I'm sure mid and higher end will follow suit.
 
ShuttleLuv said:
Well Maxwell is just releasing and even though it's lower end, it's the start of Nvidia's mining increase. I'm sure mid and higher end will follow suit.
Click to expand...

Nope. Not going to happen. This is an architectural design trade-off Nvidia made to de-emphasize integer compute in order to meet their other design goals. They will focus on CUDA and AMD plans to further increase their performance in SHA-256 hashing and other ALU-bound GPGPU workloads.

It'll be a long time before they bridge the gap.
 
Uhh, what. I don't think you quite understand how much NV increased their hashrate per watt with Maxwell. The GM107 doubled the mining performance over the older 650ti. The 750ti is getting hashrates higher than the 260X which has a far higher TDP than the GM107, while the comparable TDP AMD part is the R7-250 and needless to say - the GM107 destroys it in terms of hashrate. You can read a story on PCPer's front page about all of this, they benchmarked hashrates and found the 750ti netting about 300KH with a 60W TDP with a slight overclock; non overclocked was around 265.. The hashrate per watt was far higher than any AMD card, although obviously the GM107 is a low end part. The real story is what happens when GM200 and GM204 hit. Those cards should easily achieve way better hash per watt than what AMD has. FYI, the reason AMD cards have traditionally been good at mining was because of doing 3 int ops per cycle on ALU bound operations. From what i'm reading, Kepler only did 1 int per OP and the same was true for Fermi. But Maxwell matches AMD's 3 int ops per cycle. So it's going to be just as good, at least whenever the scaled up Maxwell cards hit. For the time being, the GM107 has insane hash per watt but it is a low end card. It obviously won't match a 290X in terms of hash per PCIE slot.

Story here:

http://www.pcper.com/news/General-T...-Performance-Increases-Maxwell-and-GTX-750-Ti

That said, i'm not a fan of the situation at all. Personally I would be content with NV continuing to have terrible hash per watt - i'm very much a fan of these GPUs being used for their original design intent. PC gaming. Fuck mining, that's the way I look at it - hopefully scrypt will be dead by the time big Maxwell is released in 2H this year. I'd be more content with Maxwell if NV had not changed the ALU cycles per op, which is what is important with mining.
 
Last edited:
MSRP =/ Actual Retail Price.

The R9 MSRP has remained the same. It's the retailers that are price fixing.
You'll see pricing come down once competition comes from Nv or when lawyers step in.
 
dandragonrage said:
I'm fairly neutral to Bitcoin and only Bitcoin. I don't have any but could see myself at some point having some. My relatively negative points were specifically for all the copycats. Creating tons of different cryptocurrencies just because people want "free" "money" from mining just devalues the value of cryptocurrency as a whole, would confuse everyone but the few extremely-well-informed, and in general causes fragmentation that makes all cryptocurrency - including Bitcoin - less likely to succeed (or at the very least less impactful). Tiger accepts Bitcoin as their execs are clearly at least fairly well-informed about tech trends. Most companies, upon hearing about BitCoin, would probably be much more likely to dismiss it when they find out about DogeCoin (especially this one), AltCoin, LiteCoin, etc... They won't be able to take cryptocurrency seriously as a result. Like I said before, it'll be like Linux. Maybe it'll stay that way anyway. Who knows.

In other words, I think Bitcoin AND cryptocurrency as a whole would be taken more seriously if stupid crap like DogeCoin didn't exist.

BTW, on a tangent, I WAS a bit more anti-Bitcoin than I am now until recently, but http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/andreas-antonopoulos was a good episode. They made me a bit interested.
Click to expand...

I agree about the myriad of copycoins but Litecoin had a purpose since it was more ASIC-resistant than the SHA-256 Bitcoin, and Dogecoin is (I think) the first non-deflationary cryptocurrency, so it has that going for it. I don't know that deflationary currencies like BTC have any real hope of working out long-term.
 
what AMD and Nvidia really need to do is come out with split brands. One for mining and one for gaming.......but what do I know....
 
dandragonrage said:
I'm fairly neutral to Bitcoin and only Bitcoin... etc
Click to expand...


I more or less agree with this as well. I wish BTC had been better thought out for the long term in the first place, but that's just 20/20 hindsight. On the other hand it seems to me that the market for and acceptance of crypto would be better without all the dilution. I know it's not really dilution from a currency sense, but it does appear to be a big confusing mess from the outside.

Seems like this thread would be better in the crypto subforum, but between GPUs and crypto it's hard to see the line.
 
xoleras said:
i'm very much a fan of these GPUs being used for their original design intent. PC gaming. Fuck mining.
Click to expand...

You mean rendering, GPUs were designed for rendering, fuck gaming, it just drives the price up for people who need GPUs to do actual stuff with them.
 
On the flipside, if crypto currency bombs there will be a glut of high end cards available on the cheap!
 
Spazturtle said:
You mean rendering, GPUs were designed for rendering, fuck gaming, it just drives the price up for people who need GPUs to do actual stuff with them.
Click to expand...
Consumerization actually brought the cost of GPUs down. Remember Silicon Graphics?
 
I keep trying to jump in between the race for miners to get the cards..I miss every time.
I've been on a MSI TWN FRZR II 6950 since almost release and one of the fans is bugging when it's too cool and won't spin with the low volts.

It's killing me to try to find an upgrade at an honest price. I don't mine nor do I have any interest to, I think it's hurting the general PC community but making the business side drool.

Then I'm supposed to wait for a next gen GPU to come out so I can have the "abused" miners cards...frustrating.

If anyone is interested in my card for trade+cash or just selling me an upgrade at an honest price...please PM me. All I'm looking for is a 78xx, 79xx, 280X, 2GB+ or the alike. I almost don't even care if it's a single fan solution with a bit of noise at this point.
 
I am slightly surprised one of AMD's AIB partners has not released a variant just for mining already. (less ram, better power management, better cooling, higher clocks where it counts, etc.).

AMD could just start their own farm, they might turn a profit for a change. :D j/k
 
GORANKAR said:
I am slightly surprised one of AMD's AIB partners has not released a variant just for mining already. (less ram, better power management, better cooling, higher clocks where it counts, etc.).

AMD could just start their own farm, they might turn a profit for a change. :D j/k
Click to expand...

I've wondered myself why AMD hasn't just released a card specifically for mining. If it was the fastest thing available they could pretty much set their price...
 
Because those cards wouldn't be much different and in the long run have less value. Eg low resale value when mining on GPUs becomes less profitable since your special ed half ram mining GPU is now useless and no one wants to buy it. With full GPU s you can resell them for a decent price .

Amd could probably develop asics with specialized chips JUST for mining. Eg take a GPU remove all non mining components to reduce heat and power , tweak memory timing etc. But that is a bit risky.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top