Three million add-in boards (AIBs) were sold to cryptocurrency miners in 2017
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Kaarme
The whole market is so weird because of miners. The miners would have actually bought much more units if they had been available, but the manufacturers weren't willing to sell because the miners are such thankless customers. Still, as a person who does not mine, that "Gaming has been and will continue to be the primary driver for GPU sales" feels like an insult with the current prices. Video cards are right now priced like expensive professional tools, so they obviously are meant for the professionals, whether it's the miners or companies and institutions using them for computing work. The current prices aren't aimed at gamers, not even as a joke.
fantaskarsef
Gaming is no longer driving GPU sales... that's all just PR talking, don't buy into it.
But I have to say, I'm not sure what makes a gamer a less "thankless" customer than a miner...
cryohellinc
There is some information floating that Next Nvidia's release will include 2 GPU series - Ampere for Consumer / Turing for Miners.
Personally, from my point of view, it will make the most sense. As I wrote earlier about it that will potentially stabilize the market and get it back on track.
However, it will Only work if Turing cards will have Significantly higher crypto performance, and vice-versa with Ampere. Hopefully, we will also see hardware level limitation for mining on Ampere.
Otherwise greedy cyber Dwarfs will continue buying out everything that moves.
fantaskarsef
Maybe I did misinterpret the stats above, but to me it looks like actually AMD is picking up big in market share. I don't really see any monopoly there...
Just be mindful, as Intel's iGPUs are integrated in this statistics, so are AMD's, so those shares given are not about dedicated GPUs.
Also, this is a little questionable:
So first they profit from higher demands than supplies, upping the revenue of the vendors and the margin of the sellers, then the demand drops and the costs increase because of utility costs driving up AIB prices? GTFO.
Also, many gamers don't use their cards for mining because they don't want to degrade them with 20h per day mining use and 4h of gaming...
cryohellinc
Precisely This.
Kaarme
Gamer doesn't buy a bunch of cards from any manufacturer and then run them 24/7, which probably wasn't what the components were optimised for. I don't actually know if it caused an increase in warranty returns, as I have only read about third party claims it did, but nothing verified. On the other hand, if the crypto values happened to drop critically, the miners would simply try to sell their cards to minimise their losses, which would create a flood of even the latest gen cards on the second-hand market, hurting the sales of new cards. You'd hardly see that from gamers, after all, unless a gamer decides to stop gaming entirely, they'll need their card until it gets too slow for them.
fantaskarsef
Yes I can understand your points, and they are very reasonable. Like you said, I too am waiting to see that RMAs have indeed increased since most professional miners don't care... they just buy another card. Only gamers RMA their cards because they had to save up some budget and want it to work, as it's their only card and they need it to run. And yet we haven't seen a flooded market of second hand GPUs, so right now, to the companies miners are probably the better customers, or equally good ones like gamers.
cryohellinc
There are always ex-miner cards on the market and when bubble pops we will have even more of them. Golden rule is to Never Ever Buy an Ex-Miner card.
Wear and tear on it is above anything remotely imaginable.
There was an article on one russian tech site, analyzing a batch of new gtx 1060's gpu's vs a batch of same models but ex-miner cards. Overall the result was that ex-miner cards had degradation from anything between 5% down to 30%.
fantaskarsef
Well, in your opinion, which I share, I'm not trying to defend mining here. It's just that if you take a step back, seeing it from a production company's point of view, the "better" customer is the one just paying more, and that's basically the miners.
Yes they do degrade, the question is, because a card has degraded 5% it doesn't make it useless. Do I understand correctly if I say those cards lifetime is shortened, or did they reach 5-30% lower clocks because of power delivery wear down or something like that?
cryohellinc
Crypto is most likely a short-term gold rush, gaming isn't. That's the whole difference, and they understand it. Hence all the hints pointing towards next release of Consumer GPU's / Mining GPU's.
If they focus only on profit and alienate consumers, this May result in a massive loss for them down the road. Yes, they care about shares, but they also care about sustainability which, IMO, Crypto doesn't offer.
Dragam1337
Oh look, a miner...
Mining is wasting enormous amounts of energy to do what exactly? Farming some virtual currency... it doesn't contribute to ANYTHING, except gaining certain greedy individuals more wealth. But as with all currencies, it only has the value people believe it to have, and as it's just some niche, it will soon lose favor, and lose all value. I look forward to that day.
fantaskarsef
I might have not used them all until they were done for on a physical level, but I have 6 GPUs at home out of the 9 or 10 I ever had:
-Radeon 4850, basically has a hard time with youtube 1080p playback. Uses a lot of power and generates heat like no other card I ever had. No use for it for anybody
-2x 5770 that's of little use, it would be okay, but with AMD drivers I had trouble enough to get HDMI sound working so I bought a new GPU (like 5 years after release)
-580, yes that one was used until it was necessary to replace it because of graphical artifacts at stock usage
-960, runs in my HTPC (because of reused CPU without an iGPU I do need one there hehe)
-1080Ti, gaming card
-not to mention the 2x 980 I gave away to friends for free after less than two years of use, where they still do their work for GAMING 😀
None of my cards ever was used for mining...
Did you use any GPUs until they were really done for, and found uses for your's after they no longer were really doing their gaming job? Not trying to bash you, just curious.
Embra
Has revenue from miners over taken sales to gamers for some products? Be interesting to see the numbers.
fantaskarsef
I'd be willing to bet some REAL MONEY ( 😀 ) that more cards were sold to miners than to gamers.
Embra
Sadly that kind of revenue can not be ignored. Be interesting to see some numbers over the last few years.
cryohellinc
Crypto-rush has all indications of a Bubble/ Pyramid scheme. Any pyramidal scheme grows and generates profit for its "users" as long as there is a constant influx of new "users".
Exactly the same thing we see here, it's a gold rush, maybe even a trend to some degree.
Another indication of a bubble/ pyramid is how it fluctuates. 2k, then 3k, 10k, 20k, then 10k again. I predict eventually it will rise all the way to 100k (or even more), however when eventually the Speculative Bubble pop's the main problem as with any other Bubble will be Overvalued coins at hand. Yes, it will cost $100k, however, nobody wants to buy it from you for that price, and that's the hook.
Same as during the days of actual Gold Rush, people that made the most profit were not the one's mining for Gold, but selling the Tools to do so. So far we can see the same thing here.
rl66
the most important thing about crypto$:
-the carbon footprint of Crypto$ is now at same level than car polution... 🙁
-those who have start earlier have most of the cake... those who have started recentely (with mining craze) have what is left (some dust).
-it is considerated illegal to use it in more country each years (despite the flow is on survey in USA and EU)
-more and more people (sadly not the richest) have started to loose everything due to the instability of the crypto$ (never ever convert all your saved money into those crypto$... if it fall from -25% you will have your economy divided by 4).
liviut
Like 4 years ago i bought an R9 290 sapphire tri-x which was used for mining for like 6 months or so, i was skeptical like everybody about buying a mining gpu, but it was half the price at that time even lower if i remember right, and after 4 years of gaming, it still rocks, i had 0 problems with it, maybe i was the lucky one and won the silicon lottery on it.
Silva
Sadly I don't think either AMD or Nvidia will implement measures to avoid mining on their cards. They are, after all, after the selling profits and miners are costumers. I even bet that after this mining craze that prices will stay up because AMD can't touch Nvidia. Our only hope would be that Intel would make a decent GPU but as greedy as they are, I don't believe they'd make a price war.
Bottom end: we're all screwed, it's the fall of PC gaming (at least for low to mid budget people).
gx-x
You are very correct. Look at your post again and tell me, do you see an opportunity there or not? 🙂 I'll tell you this much - margin trading pays off more than mining if you invest enough money. Buy low, sell high. Buy lower, sell a bit higher. What does this reminds me of....hmm.. Oh yes! Regular stock market, Currency exchange, money exchange, etc.
PS. There will always be a new coin to mine. Block Chain isn't going anywhere, and with crypto going wildly up-down, neither are margin traders.
PPS. If nVidia wasn't as greedy and gave normal warranty conditions on their mining cards (which are mainly the same as gaming counterpart), maybe miners wouldn't be buying all of the gaming cards. Small miners don't want to risk it with no warranty or 3 months warranty on product that has almost no resale value out of the box.
So the problem could be solved relatively easy, on expense of the super rich companies instead of on gamers/users pockets.
