[HN Gopher] In 2019 RX470 were $70, RX580 $100
___________________________________________________________________
In 2019 RX470 were $70, RX580 $100
Author : albxxdx
Score : 278 points
Date : 2022-09-20 12:55 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (postadio.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (postadio.com)
| smcl wrote:
| I picked up an RX580 when restrictions tightened at one point in
| my country and I decided to build a gaming PC (to play Doom 2016
| first and foremost) - cost me what works out to $243 (5999 CZK).
| It was the cheapest non-bad card I could find at that point, but
| I timed it well as there were basically no gfx cards around for
| months and months afterwards. When they started showing up again
| everything was astronomical in value and sold out quickly.
|
| Nice little card, handled admirably whatever I threw at it
| (Cyberpunk struggled a little, though).
| switch007 wrote:
| 2022 is definitely the year for being lied to and gaslight and
| purposefully confused about pricing and quality.
|
| And overcharging in shops seems to have become commonplace in
| UK/Ireland
| latchkey wrote:
| I have 6 digits worth of these chips. They've been running fine
| for years in all sorts of weather conditions. Mining does not
| destroy cards.
|
| The paste goes bad, but is easily replaced (majority of our cards
| have been running just fine with OEM old paste). We don't have
| fans on the cards, but if we did those would go bad and easily
| replaced. But the cards themselves, really don't go bad very
| often.
|
| If you're thinking about picking some up, don't worry about the
| mining part, but definitely use that to try to get a discount.
| simias wrote:
| Yeah I don't really understand this worry about buying cards
| used for mining. If you're worried about wear I'd still rather
| take a miner's card than one that was used by a heavy gamer and
| routinely pushed to the limit.
|
| I feel like people dislike cryptominers (IMO reasonably, and
| for all sorts of reasons) and want to punish them all the way
| by preventing them from liquidating their stocks of cards, but
| I don't think it's a good reason to make stuff up.
|
| I wouldn't buy a card that I know was used for mining because
| I'm effectively boycotting miners, not because of some made up
| technical excuse.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Last crypto crash years ago I bought a used Titan XP for an
| insane price after the miners started having to dump them
| super cheap. Still running it today and it has chewed through
| even the craziest games. They probably bought it for way more
| so I don't think it is really effective to "boycott" them by
| not buying the card if you are the one getting a super good
| deal.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I'd not be worried about wear but about whatever meddling was
| done with the firmware (edit: or hardware). Maybe an
| experienced miner knows how to easily return it back to
| stock, but who knows who you're dealing with. Someone else
| can take the chance.
|
| Also, PC gamers are the last group I would expect to
| successfully boycott something. They'll install some spyware-
| ridden game launcher just to get a $5 discount on a game,
| while complaining about it. What discount will they resist
| for a mined-on GPU? $50? Assuming they even know it was mined
| on.
| latchkey wrote:
| Easy to reset the firmware (vbios) to stock.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Hardware fuses.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| The only problem I have with miners is that I don't
| understand the economics. My understanding is that air
| conditioning in data centres is a non-trivial cost. So the
| question is pretty much a balance of: Is air conditioning so
| expensive that it's cheaper for miners to blast these cards
| at high temperatures and accept a failure rate, or is the
| maths behind (cost * mean time between failures) so high that
| the miners are actually selling off good used equipment.
|
| You could tell me that either of those things dominate, I
| don't know. But I would want to have atleast an idea of this
| before I bought a used miners GPU.
|
| Having said that, I wouldn't buy a gamer's old GPU.
| latchkey wrote:
| The economics are simple: capex + opex. As long as you have
| an idea of ROI and can lower the cap+op as much as
| possible, you're making money. Otherwise, you're buying the
| coin directly.
|
| You can't run the cards at high temps or they crash. They
| also have built in thermal protection where they shut down
| at about 85c (depends on the settings).
|
| Miners also undervolt/underclock the cards. Lower power is
| better for opex in the equation above. =) This means they
| aren't run as hard as you might think. ethash as an algo is
| also memory hard, so the GPU portion isn't 100% at all.
| That's why older cards are still in use and more ROI
| efficient.
| npteljes wrote:
| My logic would be that these cards are for consumer usage, and
| mining means 24/7 100% load. So, a year mining would be like 5
| years of gaming, and even then you gamed 5 hours a day, every
| single day! So, mining might not destroy cards, but it's heavy
| use.
|
| I think the used goods buyers' attitude is similar to those in
| the car market. Never mind the miles, if a car had heavy users,
| like a pizza company's delivery vehicle, it looks different in
| the market than a garage-stored family car used to visit the
| relatives.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| undervolted use because not every processing component needs
| to be used
|
| very different than a car
|
| but valid questions to ask to whoever you are buying from
| used
| latchkey wrote:
| There is no such thing as 100% load in ETH GPU mining. The
| bottleneck is the memory controller, not the GPU itself.
| That's why 5+ year old cards are still more ROI efficient
| than the latest greatest cards. The only way to speed things
| up is to speed up the memory.
|
| Other algos take advantage of more of the GPU side of things
| as well. ProgPoW, if it had passed, would have done that.
| From what I understand, RVN also does as well... and uses
| more power too.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| The garage-stored car will be a bag of shite, though. You'd
| be far better going for the delivery vehicle.
| hansvm wrote:
| Counterpoint, heavy use mostly doesn't apply to solid-state
| devices (much how the expected lifespan of an incandescent
| bulb is independent of its previous usage), and to the extent
| it would matter the effect is probably dwarfed by not being
| stuck in a gaming PC full of dust and experiencing constant
| thermal shock as the games ramp up and down.
|
| To the pizza car analogy, when I was in that game I put a
| hard 60k miles/yr on such vehicles, but I also regularly
| change the oil, keep great tires and brakes on them, replace
| bushings and other suspension components at the first sign of
| issue, etc... Partly because driving that many miles makes
| issues easy to spot due to familiarity and temporal coherence
| and partly because it is cheaper to fix many such things
| sooner rather than later after they've jostled something else
| out of place. Nobody ever asked if it was a pizza car. I
| listed it as well maintained and got top dollar each time
| because it was and their inspections showed that to be true.
| falcolas wrote:
| > heavy use mostly doesn't apply to solid-state devices
|
| Sorry, but this is pretty much incorrect. Copper migrates,
| even in solid state devices, and those copper migrations
| cause breaks and shorts, which cause errors and failures.
| The smaller the scale, the faster this happens. There is
| absolutely a MTBF even for solid-state devices.
|
| This entire slide deck is worth the perusal, if only for
| the "whoah, that actually happens?!" moments. But here's a
| relevant slide for this claim:
|
| https://c3.ndc.nasa.gov/dashlink/static/media/other/Observe
| d...
|
| The money quote: "Commercial semiconductor road maps show
| component reliability timescales are being reduced to 5-7
| years." (with attribution)
|
| Another fascinating slide is this one, which shows how an
| IC can start to have a timing issue after being in service
| for a time.
|
| https://c3.ndc.nasa.gov/dashlink/static/media/other/Observe
| d...
| uhhyeahdude wrote:
| Thanks for that slide deck! Many treasures to be found
| within.
| falcolas wrote:
| Any time I share it, I go through it again. It's so dang
| fun.
| latchkey wrote:
| We've definitely seen 'memory go bad'. But, our failure
| rate is in the single digits, across a huge sample set
| across multiple years and in relatively extreme
| conditions (4 seasons, outdoors).
|
| If you're buying something for like half of retail and
| rolling the dice on it, I think it is a fair bet. Even if
| you only get 1-2 more years out of a card that has been
| used before (for any purpose), then you've done well.
| d_tr wrote:
| Half of retail (which is still high) for a mining card
| with expired warranty? No thanks.
| latchkey wrote:
| Ok, $10, but you have to pay for shipping and min order
| is 10k. ;-)
|
| For clarity, because @derac is confused below... this is
| a joke. Hence the winky face.
| derac wrote:
| Your incentive is to propagandize this point. you have
| 100k+ cards to sell on the market, by your own admission.
| latchkey wrote:
| It is amazing how crazy HN can get. I'm not
| propagandizing anything.
|
| If we sell them for pennies on the dollar or e-waste
| them, doesn't matter to me.
|
| We ROI'd these cards already.
| derac wrote:
| Whoa crazy to point out someone's conflict of interest.
| CrAzY
|
| You are sitting on 10m+ of stock and you don't care about
| the money. OK bud guess I must be schizophrenic, damn.
|
| You are literally trying to sell your cards to a sister
| comment...
|
| "Ok, $10, but you have to pay for shipping and min order
| is 10k. ;-)"
| latchkey wrote:
| There is no conflict of interest, I'm not trying to sell
| cards here on HN.
|
| You are literally making stuff up now. The 10m+ of stock
| is worthless if nobody would buy it. If anything, it'll
| cost us to e-waste it. So, the price ceiling, if we were
| to sell it, is simply the cost e-waste and moving it
| around.
|
| That was a winky face... a joke. I was kidding because
| the OP was unhappy with the statement of half price,
| which I also made up as a random baseline.
| derac wrote:
| The goal is changing the public discourse. Thus the word
| propaganda. You wouldn't be propagandizing this point of
| view if you didn't think you would change people's minds.
| You are fully aware that this forum has an outsized
| influence on the tech/programming community.
|
| Edit: to me it's clear that you are acting in bad faith
| since you called me crazy for pointing out an obvious
| conflict of interest.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| "Assume good intent." This comment, as with all of your
| other ones in this chain, blatantly violate HN
| guidelines. Accusing people of "shilling" or "spreading
| propaganda" only makes this forum worse.
| latchkey wrote:
| 1. I didn't call you crazy, I said "it is amazing how
| crazy HN can get."
|
| 2. Tell me exactly how would it benefit me to change
| public discourse around the long term reliability of
| GPUs? The most I can think of is that it might drive up
| the prices of used cards a tiny bit in a very saturated
| market, but I doubt it. Especially since I'm just one
| data point and I'm only posting here on HN. Plus, as I
| said, I don't care what our cards sell for. Our baseline
| cost at this point, is to offset any price of e-waste and
| shipping.
|
| 3. I shared my findings about long term reliability
| because this is a tech community and I thought they'd be
| interested in it! OMG, I'm such a horrible person for
| thinking this way! That is sarcasm.
|
| 4. Allowing people to realize that mined on GPUs are
| actually ok (not all, but generally better than common
| thought) might mean that a few more find useful homes and
| not end up as e-waste. That's a good thing! I even
| suggested that people use it as a way to negotiate the
| price down!
| derac wrote:
| Fwiw, I don't think you're a bad person. I think you have
| a conflict of interest and they way you are responding to
| criticism is weird. You also handwaved the copper
| migration issue. Meh. Carry on. Personally, I took that
| as you calling me crazy. If that wasn't your intention,
| fair enough.
| latchkey wrote:
| Your criticism is to say that I'm spreading propaganda,
| which is untrue and it is fair for me to respond to that.
|
| Now you're at it again with the criticism. I'm not
| handwaving anything. I'm stating what I saw after having
| the fairly rare experience of running 100k+ GPUs over
| multiple years in harsh environments.
|
| Let's turn that around, do you have any experience with
| this at all? Or do you just criticize people?
|
| It also doesn't benefit me in any way to share
| information like this. I'm only sharing this information
| now because we're pretty much done with this phase of the
| business, so I can talk about things a bit more openly,
| and it seems relevant to share on a thread about RX
| cards.
| derac wrote:
| I didn't say it was not ok to respond. Calling people
| crazy is the weird part.
|
| You did handwave that, we can agree to disagree.
|
| I didn't even say you are or aren't doing anything
| nefarious. I pointed out a conflict of interest
| (incentive to propagandize) and you responded by calling
| me crazy. Now you are saying "All I do is criticize".
| Boohoo to you sir.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| Dude it's nuts how often people sling the "shill" insult
| on HN. One of the laziest insults by far, and I'd guess
| incorrect very near 100% of the time.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Counter counter point, chips break down over time even
| though they're solid state. The flow of electricity through
| a chip will slowly degrade the metal traces inside it. At
| the nanometer scale, it doesn't take much to ruin a logic
| gate. This is called _electromigration_.
|
| You can care for that car (or chip) all you want, but chips
| aren't cars. It's a slow process, and may not happen on the
| timescale of mining, but it happens.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_aging
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-
| dependent_gate_oxide_brea...
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| > _heavy use mostly doesn 't apply to solid-state devices_
|
| It kinda does. The effects are small, but increase as the
| fab node gets smaller.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration
| ithinkso wrote:
| > (much how the expected lifespan of an incandescent bulb
| is independent of its previous usage)
|
| Either I'm reading this sentence incorrectly or there is
| something else I don't understand. How can that statement
| be true?
| rowanG077 wrote:
| It's possible if you have a completely flat failure rate.
| For every time unit spend it has x% failure rate. An
| example is a piece of rock on the side of the road.
| Everyday it has a small chance to be smashed by a car.
| But that chance doesn't increase or decrease over time.
| Unless external factors change
|
| Whether it's true for light bulbs I don't know.
| HenriTEL wrote:
| I guess the bulb does not degrade over time, it just
| break at some point when some random events occur.
| ithinkso wrote:
| I don't think that's true, the filament evaporates
| (sublimes?, sublimates?) from the heat and eventually it
| is too thin to support itself and breaks. That's how I
| always understood the main failure mode of incadescent
| bulbs and that's why the above statement confuses me
| garaetjjte wrote:
| On the other hand 24/7 usage means no thermal cycling,
| probably eliminating failures caused by solder joint
| cracking.
| latchkey wrote:
| The machines reboot a lot for auto tuning. Plenty of
| thermal cycling that happens in all temperatures. Still
| didn't see any issues.
|
| PSU's, on the other hand, are mostly hand soldered in China
| and have all sorts of issues.
| Scramblejams wrote:
| Who/what do you like for PSUs for operating in that harsh
| environment?
| latchkey wrote:
| We've run a ton of different PSU's. Everything from super
| cheap no-name chinese stuff to refurb/tested high end HP
| server class. None of them are super reliable.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I trust mining GPUs a lot more than gamer owned GPUs tbh.
| Better ventilation, severe undervolting, not even maxing the
| gpu itself and the fans are not actually spinning that fast.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| One thing I find kind of interesting about this -- the folks
| dumping cards on the market had farms. Those running mining
| farms are playing a numbers game
|
| This involves under-clocking _and_ under-volting the cards,
| while also ensuring they 're cooled well.
|
| I think an argument could be made that mined-on cards are more
| well cared for than those owned by your average gamer.
|
| There's not some 'destroy the ASIC' instruction. Work is work.
|
| Mined on cards undergo fewer duty _cycles_ , I wonder how the
| calculus works out between one long mild duty cycle compared to
| many more that are also more extreme.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| >>I think an argument could be made that mined-on cards are
| more well cared for than those owned by your average gamer.
|
| What strikes me though is people are rarely discussing
| mileage, only nature of work.
|
| The video card in my gaming computer works, on average, maybe
| 1hr/week (some weeks more, most weeks 0). So right out of the
| gate, my video card has been working basically 168 _times_
| less long than any mining card running 24x7. We are talking
| more than two orders of magnitude difference in "mileage",
| before we discuss how well or poorly it has been taken care
| of.
| LoveMortuus wrote:
| Most of the "damage" that happens to a GPU is due to
| thermal expansion, which happens at to a more extreme
| degree if you're cold booting a game and then from a hot
| gaming state back down to cold. Where are with mining it's
| usually running constantly at a more or less stable
| temperature, thus it experiences much less of stress from
| the thermal expansion side of things.
| belval wrote:
| My understanding is that it's similar to a car, changing
| state (starting/stopping) is much more damaging that
| running the same thing, at the same temperature/voltage for
| extended period of time.
| latchkey wrote:
| I've rebooted GPUs hundreds of times to find the optimal
| tuning parameters. Failures after a reboot were very few
| and long term over the entire collection of GPUs, we've
| seen very few failures. Definitely within operating
| parameters.
| Obi_Juan_Kenobi wrote:
| They usually undervolt/clock the GPU, but not the memory.
| VRAM temps can be an issue and only some miners will try to
| address that properly with copper shims, etc.
|
| The 3090 is notoriously bad for mining because it has memory
| chips on both sides of the board, leading to more heating in
| one spot and poor cooling for the 'back side' chip. Other
| cards tolerate it much better, but it can be an issue.
|
| So while overall mining cards should be good, there are some
| specific issues to watch out for. A failed memory chip is not
| an easy fix, requiring a reball/replacement of that chip.
| latchkey wrote:
| 100% accurate. ethash is memory bound. I've definitely seen
| 'memory go bad'... but at our scale, the percentage failure
| rate on that is in the single low digits. Additionally, we
| have cards that run just fine for years on end.
|
| Maybe, as you suggest, it is just something that is more
| card specific.
| [deleted]
| latchkey wrote:
| Most large farms don't have the ability to properly tune
| cards for best ROI. At scale, it is too hard because each
| card is a snowflake in terms of performance. In order to
| tune, you're basically pushing the card to the limits of
| underclock/undervolt... which means the card crashes.
| Therefore, most large farms actually undertuned, for
| stability, which is the least abusive on the cards.
|
| If the card crashes due to tuning, the machine crashes, and
| the rest of the cards are taken offline until the machine
| reboots. In order to change settings, you have to reboot the
| entire machine too. It is a pain in the ass to find optimal
| tuning at scale.
|
| There is no publicly available software to 'autotune' cards
| at scale. It took me a long time to first learn how to tune
| cards (by hand tuning thousands of cards and getting a
| feeling for things) and then once I figured that out, I built
| software to do this. It required changes in the AMD driver to
| get it to output in the kernel messages, which card was
| crashing. It required updating the mining software itself. It
| was a nutty insane project, but it worked well. We hit our
| target hashrate / power usage.
| Melatonic wrote:
| You should really pivot and start selling that software.
| Package it up with a nice pretty bow and wrapper and it
| could be a very lucrative product.
| hailwren wrote:
| What are you doing now? Did you shut the project down
| entirely?
| latchkey wrote:
| Some is shut down, some is mining other coins. Kind of a
| wait and see time right now.
| Ruphin wrote:
| With Ethereum no longer in the game the total USD
| issuance for GPU mining probably dropped over 80%. Is
| your strategy to just wait out for miners to capitulate
| until mining is profitable again? Are you not worried
| that this will crater the value of your hardware?
| latchkey wrote:
| We bootstrapped the company on mining, knowing full well
| that it would eventually end, and our business model goes
| beyond just mining ETH.
|
| That was another reason to go with the RX4/5 series...
| fastest route to ROI.
| arcticbull wrote:
| The planet thanks you for shutting down. Don't worry, I'd
| say the same for any tobacco executive.
| superjan wrote:
| I don't particularly like crypto but I don't think we
| need to rehash the same debate again. Isn't it
| interesting to hear what this guy is going to do? Passing
| judgement does not improve the conversation.
| latchkey wrote:
| Our power is unused hydro, in a geographic location full
| of other data centers for all the large tech companies.
|
| This comment is just your continued trolling with your
| anti-crypto trope. Please try another tactic.
|
| Update: I got downvoted to -4 on this one after getting
| several upvotes. Makes me think that articbull has
| multiple accounts and is just gaming the system.
| robocat wrote:
| > downvoted
|
| You are very likely mistaking normal HN herd behaviour -
| plenty of people are going to think bullshit to "unused
| hydro".
|
| Also "Please don't comment about the voting on comments.
| It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." and
| "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing,
| shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like.
| It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're
| worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll
| look at the data." -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| If you assume that HN is full of good people, and respond
| accordingly, you will learn more and have more fun. If
| you assume HN is full of bad people causing trouble, why
| would you stick around? Good communities are built upon
| trusting cooperators and learning the valid signals of
| trust.
| latchkey wrote:
| Right after that update, I went from -4 to +2.
|
| > plenty of people are going to think bullshit to "unused
| hydro".
|
| Maybe... but the way I went up and then suddenly went
| down to -4, was super odd.
|
| > If you assume that HN is full of good people, and
| respond accordingly, you will learn more and have more
| fun..
|
| I've been around here, with an account, since 2009. It is
| the only community I participate in any more. I believe
| that HN is full of great people and that the content is
| about as good as you're going to get these days. This is
| why accounts such as articbull are becoming boring to me.
| All it is is anti-crypto hatred that is often not fully
| factual. Equating me to a tobacco exec is just icing on
| the cake. Sorry for calling that out.
| schoen wrote:
| According to the HN moderators, if you suspect someone is
| manipulating votes in some way, you're supposed to e-mail
| the moderators to have them look at it rather than making
| an accusation in your post.
| latchkey wrote:
| Sure. Apologies for calling that out in my update. That
| said, I don't feel it is worth @dang's time to waste on
| validating if someone with 24k karma is using fake
| accounts. As soon as I posted that update, the karma on
| the comment reversed.
| arcticbull wrote:
| There's no such thing. That power should be connected to
| the grid instead of wasted or put to productive use, not
| to mention all those GPUs that are about to head for the
| landfill after a long life of guessing random numbers and
| warming up the outside. Wasting the power for money
| disincentivizes storage and grid connection.
| latchkey wrote:
| You are hilarious, your crypto hatred has clouded your
| judgement. Since you have so much karma here, you don't
| mind saying silly things and losing points left and
| right.
|
| Transmission of power is expensive and lossy. These data
| centers are in a very remote location that isn't heavily
| populated. That's why they are there to begin with! The
| power would absolutely go to waste otherwise. That's also
| why we picked that area... power was cheap because it
| wasn't being used.
|
| Our GPUs are 'new old stock'. They were already produced,
| sitting in warehouses not doing anything, and would have
| gone to waste anyway.
|
| Update: Similar with the downvotes...
| arcticbull wrote:
| > You are hilarious, your crypto hatred has clouded your
| judgement. Since you have so much karma here, you don't
| mind saying silly things and losing points left and
| right.
|
| First question, where do you think I got most of the
| karma? Sentiment here is broadly against crypto and has
| been for years (although it comes and goes). The pro side
| is loud, but enjoys far less support than you might
| imagine.
|
| > Transmission of power is expensive and lossy.
|
| No, it isn't. Transmission of power is super efficient.
| The EIA says the US lost only 5% of its electricity to
| T&D over the 2016-2020 period. [1] Expensive it may be,
| but that's not a reason not to do it. A single long power
| line from Boston to LA would only see ~25% loss from one
| end to the other. The whole Ohm's law thing (P=IV), we
| use transformers that are 99%+ efficient to raise the
| voltage to ~345kV and big fat wires to reduce current and
| resistance and hence transmission line losses.
|
| > That's also why we picked that area... power was cheap
| because it wasn't being used.
|
| It should be used to do something productive, not
| generate e-waste.
|
| > Our GPUs are 'new old stock'. They were already
| produced, sitting in warehouses not doing anything, and
| would have gone to waste anyway.
|
| Or, prices would have gone down and more people would
| have bought them. I can't see 3060s getting scrapped due
| to lack of demand when they were going for $850 a pop.
|
| [1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=105&t=3
| latchkey wrote:
| > Sentiment here is broadly against crypto and has been
| for years.
|
| Agreed. However, I'd hope that 'against crypto' was less
| of one dude ranting endlessly, which is really boring and
| should get down voted.
|
| > Transmission of power is super efficient.
|
| We're not talking about efficiency. Transmission is
| expensive. Which goes beyond efficiency. You have to
| factor in the cost of the lines themselves, which are
| based on distance. I've seen these costs first hand, have
| you?
|
| > It should be used to do something productive, not
| generate e-waste.
|
| Oh yes, please define productive for me.
|
| > Or, prices would have gone down and more people would
| have bought them.
|
| They weren't for sale to the public. Nor would they ever
| have been.
|
| > I can't see 3060s getting scrapped due to lack of
| demand when they were going for $850 a pop.
|
| Huh? This whole thread is about RX4xx, which is what my
| cards are.
| [deleted]
| dumbfounder wrote:
| It's the storage that's the problem, not the
| transmission. Have talked with several in this business,
| their take is that it allows plants to have extra
| capacity to expand to meet peak needs, instead of
| flirting with disaster. Most plants are hard to spin up
| and down, so having an alternative way to monetize the
| energy creation is super important.
| Kerbonut wrote:
| Considering the current state of PoW mining, it doesn't
| seem to me like there is much advantage to holding
| secrets on auto tuning and diagnostics... (correct me if
| I'm wrong), would you consider releasing any of that work
| to the community? Auto tuning and diagnostic information
| would be incredibly useful for almost everyone.
| latchkey wrote:
| My knowledge is very specific to just these cards.
|
| The only 'secret', which isn't a secret, was that I
| realized that since this is hardware, we know the maximum
| settings (hash/watt) that should be possible. Therefore,
| I set the cards to that best setting and then tune _down_
| from there. This is the opposite train of thinking than
| most other miners.
|
| Most people think, let's start low and then tune up from
| there to make them 'faster'. The cards crash when they
| can't handle the settings, so it turns out that tuning
| down is a better way to tune since they stop crashing
| when they are stable... and thus don't need tuning from
| there. There are 3 different sets of 'knobs' to tweak, so
| I had to build an algo to adjust the knobs in the right
| order to tune things down. I just had the concept of
| 'current -> next settings'.
|
| Temperature and power fluctuations can make the cards
| crash too... so by always tuning down, you're always
| heading towards more stability instead of instability.
| Since neither of those could be controlled, machines
| would reboot randomly all the time.
|
| The software I built was a golang daemon that ran on each
| machine and watched for these crashes and modified the
| tuning of each card individually. The daemon is pretty
| cool as it is effectively a task runner. I had different
| tasks to configure and monitor the machines as well. The
| machines are all independent, idempotent and self-healing
| workers. Reliably distributing the software to 20k
| different workers, is a fun challenge. There are a ton of
| unit tests, so that helped a lot.
|
| If I have the energy, I may rip out the tasks from the
| daemon, turn it into a library and open source that. It
| is kind of a fun project that could be useful for others
| trying to manage large scale individual workers. Tasks
| could easily be 'apt install' or monitoring utilities. I
| even bundled node_exporter into the binary, so that we
| could monitor the machines with prometheus.
| captainbland wrote:
| Yeah if I had to guess, the main concern with very long
| periods of load is going to involve moving parts rather than
| anything else. So pretty much the fan is likely to go but not
| much else.
| sfmike wrote:
| what are you mining these days?
| mindw0rk wrote:
| It's not just the thermal paste that goes. There are more parts
| that are affected by the constant heat. Capacitors in the first
| place
| thfuran wrote:
| Yeah, electrolytic capacitors derate due to time under load,
| exponentialy accelerated by temperature increases.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| FWIW: "the paste can be replaced easily" is 100% true for like
| 1% of GPU consumers. As long as you replace the paste before
| resale, it's great. Otherwise the buyer might perceive that
| they have a card that's dead or slowed way down because "mining
| destroyed it."
| hot_gril wrote:
| The seller can replace the thermal paste first if it's so
| easy. It's in their interest to fetch higher prices. Not my
| job.
|
| I was just thinking today about many years ago when I test
| drove a used car and heard whistling from the roof.
| Saleswoman said it was easy to fix. It must've happened
| during every test drive and possibly dissuaded some buyers,
| so why hadn't the dealer already fixed it? I bought the car,
| and guess what, the whistling wasn't fixable.
| nathanvanfleet wrote:
| Just wondering if, for a second, you considered that repasting
| or replacing fans is a large effort for normal folks who just
| want a video card?
| latchkey wrote:
| This sounds like the perfect opportunity to buy a retail off
| the shelf card with a warranty!
|
| What kind of question is that.
| derefr wrote:
| Presumably they bought these cards, took the fans off them,
| hooked up a custom water-cooling setup, etc.; and when
| selling them, are taking the pile of fans they shucked and
| putting them back on the cards with fresh paste.
| latchkey wrote:
| We bought the cards directly from an OEM, with heatsinks on
| them instead of fans.
|
| We use a case based cooling system. ie: an enclosed box
| with fans. 12 cards in a box. This is lower power, fewer
| fans (5 instead of 12), and better cooling than putting
| fans on each card. Also easier to replace a fan on a case
| than a card.
|
| At my scale, water cooling doesn't work and isn't cost
| efficient. Air is a surprisingly great cooling system.
| Melatonic wrote:
| What does the actual heatsink look like one the card?
| Wondering if I can do this on my home system assuming I
| have good airflow on my case
| latchkey wrote:
| It looks just like a heatsink. Big aluminum bladed block.
|
| It might work, I don't know... airflow on the box itself
| wasn't enough, but there were 12 cards in the box, we
| also had to have external airflow as well. A single card
| probably wouldn't be too much of an issue though.
|
| That said, we aren't parting out single cards... it would
| be more like if you wanted to buy 5-10k of them. ;-)
| hot_gril wrote:
| I believe you out of sheer respect for your auto card tuning
| project, but in general someone with $1M of a product to sell
| has a conflict of interest with giving good advice about its
| quality.
| chungy wrote:
| Conflict of interest doesn't mean wrong, but is an indicator
| that one should take the claim dubiously until it can be
| backed up.
| latchkey wrote:
| I have a lot more than $1m (new) of these cards. 6 digits of
| CARDS, not value.
|
| We have zero cards for sale right now. Nobody wants them
| because they are heat sinks and not fans.
| lampshades wrote:
| Not the same card but five years ago I bought a refurbished GTX
| 1080 Ti that was previously used for mining. Still running
| smoothly to this day, no issues whatsoever.
| hydroev wrote:
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Same but around 3 years ago. Likely the best purchase I have
| made.
| bearjaws wrote:
| I got a 1080ti SC2 hybrid (water cooled) for $500 in 2019. Great
| purchase, has carried me all the way till now.
|
| Honestly haven't really started a new game that pushed it too
| hard until I upgraded to 144hz.
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| I've been shocked by how long the 1080 has remained a top
| performing chip, and watched the price _increase_ year after
| year.
|
| Strange times indeed.
| LegitShady wrote:
| it hasn't been a top performing chip since the 20x0 series
| came out. It's just been ok for 1080p.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I bought a Titan XP for even less after the 2018 crash (350$)
| which is basically a faster 1080 ti with a lot more RAM.
| Still running it to this day and it destroys pretty much
| everything I throw at it. Watching it go up and up in price
| during the last few years has been hilarious considering I
| have been using the thing since 2018 and bought it used to
| begin with.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| I keep reading there will be all these cheap GPUs available,
| which is great, but I then ask where I can buy them but all I get
| is ebay, and then when I check ebay, they still aren't cheap.
| Where will all these miners be selling them? So I can buy a few.
| kyriakos wrote:
| I can't seem to find a 3080 under 750 euro in EU (used or new).
| Actually ebay.de prices seem to be still higher than store
| prices.
| derac wrote:
| /r/buildapcsales /r/hardwareswap
| Obi_Juan_Kenobi wrote:
| It's just starting to kick in.
|
| Most miners stuck it out to the bitter end. Hashrate was only
| down around 20% from the peak at the switch to PoS. Then it
| takes a few days to take apart the rigs and get them ready for
| listing. And that's only for the ones that aren't trying to
| mine something else, or simply are in denial.
|
| But the main counterpoint to the GPU supply increase is the
| pent up demand from two years of usurious GPU pricing. A lot of
| people are ready to finally upgrade as soon as prices are
| reasonable.
|
| Expect the market to soften - and it is, 3060ti prices are down
| like $40 over a couple days on eBay - but I also wouldn't
| expect bargain prices.
| timtom39 wrote:
| Prices are falling quickly. 3090 was ~$900 on ebay last week.
| You can now pick one up for $600. Look at the auctions buy it
| now prices take longer to drop.
| sorenjan wrote:
| Has people been mining with 3090? I thought you didn't need
| that much vram for mining and that other cards would be much
| more cost effective.
| uni_rule wrote:
| The top end cards were just regular scalping in a similar
| vein to the ps5, opportunists. The mining was just icing on
| the cake.
| capableweb wrote:
| > The mining was just icing on the cake.
|
| No, 3090 didn't make sense to use for mining. Too low
| profit compared to what you had to pay for it. There is
| better cards to get for mining, even if they have worse
| performance. Performance per $ makes the rules.
| sgerenser wrote:
| Prices are definitely dropping, but $600 seems like a
| stretch. I searched for "rtx 3090", checked "used" only, sold
| items, only auctions. Last 5 sold were $715, $812, $840,
| $760, $870 (I skipped a few outliers that were actually 3090
| Ti).
| Jackson__ wrote:
| Auction prices also have a strange habit of increasing over
| time.
|
| (A quick ebay search shows that 98+% of sold auctions for
| 3090s did so at a price of >700$.[1])
|
| [1] https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=3090&_saca
| t=0...
| nightski wrote:
| Best Buy had them sub $1000. Still close too [1].
|
| [1] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/nvidia-geforce-
| rtx-3090-ti-tita...
| toast0 wrote:
| eBay, craigslist, facebook marketplace, hardware enthusiast
| forums, etc.
|
| But it's going to take them time to get them prepped for sale,
| so they're not going to show up all at once.
| eesmith wrote:
| (In case you hadn't seen it, I found more about Italian POW
| parolees at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32890349 .
| Apologies all for threadjacking.)
| meltedcapacitor wrote:
| A lot of miners are probably still in the denial phase thinking
| they'll mine a PoW fork of ETH or the remaining GPU-friendly
| proof-of-work coins like ETC or monero.
|
| It's easy to fall for it: if they look at what their mining
| power will make if applied to the pre-merge difficulty and
| rewards, it probably does look okay. Of course, in reality all
| the ex-ETH miners doing this will make difficulty go through
| the roof facing a constant reward, taking them below water.
|
| Some who understand the above may think that price of other PoW
| coins will increase matching increased work ("there's more
| work, work is value, more work higher price, right?").
|
| Then at some point all this will unfold, taking PoW coin prices
| down, which will increase coin sales to pay shortfall on
| electricity bills, which feeds itself, so once all this is done
| one can expect both very cheap GPUs and cheap ETC. LOL.
|
| Then we'll probably get a bit of bungee jumping on the share
| prices of AMD, Nvidia, etc as the stock market participant
| interpret the associated blip in new GPU sales as "the end of
| gaming" etc.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wonder if it would make sense for a GPU miner to switch
| over to becoming a stable diffusion render farm or something.
| latchkey wrote:
| Monero isn't gpu friendly.
| Zenst wrote:
| >With the inclusion of a new competitor, Intel, this means this
| time there will be 4 players offering GPUs to the market: AMD,
| Nvidia, miners and Intel.
|
| Poor Intel, they paper launched at the right time, but actually
| (possibly) launching right as that market is going to crash, even
| with competitive pricing they are going to be up against what
| will be a saturated second-hand market.
|
| Then there will be time to stabalise and iron out their drivers
| that the others had years/decades to do instead of going from
| scratch.
|
| Do hope Intel rides it out on GPU's as they do seem to be onto
| something, but the market can be so cruel and times are a
| changing on many levels that will see a shift from a sellers
| market to a buyers market due to far less buyers and recessions
| globally hitting many a wallet.
| hot_gril wrote:
| And Apple, since they now make their own integrated graphics
| instead of using Intel for integrated and AMD for dedicated.
| asutekku wrote:
| Most interesting thing about this post is honestly the site.
| While right now it seems like 90% of the content is created by
| the founders (every board has only one user posting) the approach
| is quite interesting and with some tweaks it could be a great
| platform for some more information focused hobbies.
| queuebert wrote:
| It's Pinterest meets Fark.
| xkfm wrote:
| I noticed this too. I hope it has some legs, would be nice to
| see another competitor in the space.
| Lucent wrote:
| Ignoring the upside/downside of buying used mining cards, is
| anyone else purposefully not buying to punish those who hoarded
| all the GPUs with an inability to profitably exit a commons-
| harming hustle so they might think twice before trying it again?
| [deleted]
| gruez wrote:
| Sounds like ESG investing. The dynamics are the same. You want
| to punish The Bad Guys by withholding something from them,
| either capital or purchasing dollars. However, doing so creates
| an imbalance in the markets so they end up getting underpriced,
| which turns into a transfer of wealth from the people with
| moral convictions to people without.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| People think that if there were no scalpers, that they would be
| able to get a card at MSRP. But that's completely misguided.
| They wouldn't be able to get a card at all.
|
| Affordable, widely available, obtainable. In a supply
| constrained market, you can only choose two of those. Scalpers
| make it so it's widely available and obtainable. But no other
| option would help everyone get cards at MSRP.
| vachina wrote:
| Clicked skip cutscene and got a Series X instead.
| danuker wrote:
| If it is commons-harming, it should be addressed by the commons
| - through politics.
|
| I should be free to use energy as I wish, just that the cost of
| externalities should be internalized (i.e. taxes for greenhouse
| emissions should be baked into the price of electricity, or
| alternatively the fossil fuel used in the first place).
|
| As such, prices would give us a mechanism to judge the TRUE
| total cost of, say, leaving a light on versus its productivity
| benefits.
| uni_rule wrote:
| They aren't going to regulate shit, 90% of Congress still
| calls the computer tower the hard drive. They aren't going to
| regulate dirty fuels either because whether they produce
| pollution is now a matter of "opinion" tied inherently to
| partisan brainrot.
| JustLurking2022 wrote:
| At the moment, you are free to do so, but everyone else is
| free to think you're a giant pile of cow dung for doing it,
| and screwing over the planet in the process. Hopefully, the
| commons will strike bank by cracking down hard on crypto to
| effectively wipe out any profits and deter future schemes
| that emerge faster than regulators can stay on top of them.
| Liquix wrote:
| BTC being portrayed as "bad for the environment" is just as
| ridiculous as trying to guilt people into buying meat
| alternatives or electric cars because their way of life is
| "bad for the environment".
|
| Almost 90% of the world's pollution comes from unregulated
| factories in China spewing literal tons of waste into the
| air and water - Nike, Apple, BMW, Adidas, etc factories
| [0]. If these companies were forced to care about the
| environment or move manufacturing back into their home
| countries, the "environmental crisis" would be solved
| overnight.
|
| But this can't happen because the companies will make less
| money - so instead they shift the blame onto the consumer:
| BTC is bad, plastic straws are bad, think about your
| "carbon footprint" (a term invented by big oil thinktanks
| to shift blame back onto their customers [1]). Nothing that
| private citizens do has any impact whatsoever on the
| environment _when compared to the actions of these
| corporations_. Only difference is they have billions of
| dollars to spend convincing you it 's your fault.
|
| [0] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-
| polluti...
|
| [1]
| https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-
| oi...
| uni_rule wrote:
| We get that you're playing cookie clicker with real life
| money / thousands of dollars of computer hardware but you
| don't need to act like you're doing the world a service
| with it. It's inherently wasteful because proof of work
| is inherently wasteful. All it is, is a massive energy
| sink for the sole (uncharismatic) purpose of gaming a
| digital currency's value back and forth to USD for
| profit. At the very least factories actually produce
| goods. All crypto produces is speculation, its original
| existence as a "currency" almost completely vestigial to
| it's current purpose as cynical gambling chip held in
| reference to actual hard currency. Also the fact that
| this is even in the same stratosphere as the world's
| global manufacturing hub is fucking mortifying, how the
| hell is that justifyable? How is that not inefficient to
| the point of lunacy? What does that add to society?
| doubled112 wrote:
| I got a painful reminder of this in the spring.
|
| The RX 570 I had in my build died. I paid around $199 CAD for it.
|
| Retail for an RX 6400 was around double that, and based on
| benchmarks online, it would have provided worse performance,
| which is shocking 5 years later.
|
| I sucked up purchasing an RTX 3050 for around $400 since it was
| at least a performance increase, albeit not very high on the bang
| for my bucks scale.
| LegitShady wrote:
| you had to buy a video card during the biggest supply crunch of
| video cards in some time. It's not surprising.
| ar-nelson wrote:
| I got one of these cheap RX580s in 2019, and, after not really
| using it for much, proceeded to use it to mine ETH throughout
| 2021. I was shocked that such an affordable GPU could mine
| (somewhat) profitably; I did the math, and it seemed like the
| card would pay for itself if I mined for a few months.
|
| ...and then I discovered US crypto taxes, which triggered on
| _every single incremental payout_ from the mining pool I used
| (NiceHash). Taxes completely wiped out my mining profits. And now
| after the merge it won 't be profitable to mine ETH again anyway.
| :/
|
| I'm now trying to get the card to run Stable Diffusion, and I'm
| having a terrible time with that too, since it's _just_ old
| enough to not support the latest Linux ROCm driver.
| bzxcvbn wrote:
| > which triggered on every single incremental payout from the
| mining pool I used
|
| I can't really see how small taxes spread out over small pay-
| outs would be different from a large tax over the total. It's
| your marginal tax rate anyway.
| usednet wrote:
| I'm not a tax avoidance advocate but you really reported your
| few hundred in mining profits? In similar situations I'd wage
| 99% of miners don't report and have never had problems.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Yeah, this is another reason why so many people are
| suspicious of the push for "cash like" systems - like cash,
| they enable tax evasion. Which is one of those things we can
| each let slide for a bit on small amounts, but when it starts
| distorting the rest of the market we're not going to put up
| with.
| themitigating wrote:
| You're reasoning for violating the law is that the
| probability if getting caught is low?
| 300bps wrote:
| Pretty much everyone uses this mentality with some law.
|
| Ever go 46 MPH in a 45 MPH zone?
| nightski wrote:
| Tax evasion and speeding are not in the same category of
| crime, not even close. One is generally an infraction
| (not even a misdemeanor) and the other is a felony.
| collegeburner wrote:
| fr speeding can cause injury to others especially when
| done more than a bit, unless you're a highly trained
| driver or smth. tax evasion causes no physical harm to
| anyone.
| [deleted]
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Evading a few bucks from running numbers on your graphics
| card is not laundering money to fund trafficking or
| depriving schools of books.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If it's a rounding error, then they're both negligible
| crimes.
| ar-nelson wrote:
| Worth noting: I also reported a few thousand in trading
| profits, which were part of the same forms. So I couldn't
| just ignore crypto entirely on my taxes, and I used TaxBit to
| autogenerate the forms; it required everything in my
| transaction history to be accounted for, including all of the
| mining transactions.
| yojo wrote:
| Same story, bought an RX580 to build a budget gaming box, ended
| up mining with it to pay for the rig. Electricity in Oregon is
| pretty cheap, and I optimized well (30Mh/s), but my margins
| were healthy.
|
| I switched to another pool that paid out less often after
| realizing the accounting nightmare that nicehash makes. I did
| make a cost basis tracker, not sure if the APIs still work tho:
| https://github.com/igmcdowell/nicehash-basis-tracker
|
| As others said, you should pay taxes on the initial value of
| coins on receipt, but when you convert to fiat you only owe
| taxes on the change in value since you received it (your cost
| basis). You might even have a small loss at this point if the
| value of BTC dipped between receipt and sale.
|
| Usual IANAL/Tax person disclaimer.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| This doesn't make sense. Your tax on creating the coin is only
| your marginal tax rate. Even if you had a 37% tax rate that
| means the other 63% was being eaten by electricity?
| fallingknife wrote:
| But that's insane. That's.a 37% tax on revenue, not income.
| Nothing else is taxed like that.
| ar-nelson wrote:
| Yes, I was making a very small marginal profit after
| electricity. And the tax rate was around 30% once you combine
| federal and Massachusetts taxes, I don't remember exactly
| what it was. And anything I cashed out was double-taxed:
| first the payout from NiceHash, then the conversion from BTC
| (what they pay out in) to USD.
| teraflop wrote:
| > And anything I cashed out was double-taxed
|
| That's not how US taxes work. You're not "double-taxed"
| because when you sell your coins, you only pay tax on the
| _capital gains_ i.e. the difference from the original
| value, which you were already taxed on. (Assuming you
| correctly and accurately report the sale, that is.)
|
| In other words, each dollar you receive is taxed as income
| or as capital gains, but not both.
|
| Also, I'm not sure what you mean by triggering taxes "on
| every single payout". This is no different from a job
| that's taxed "on every single paycheck" -- all you have to
| actually report is the total at the end of the year.
| ar-nelson wrote:
| That's what I thought too. It didn't make sense at the
| time, and still doesn't, but the TaxBit forms showed a
| tax on both the payouts and the BTC->USD transaction.
| There was probably something I could have done to remove
| one of them, but I don't know enough about capital gains
| taxes to figure it out, and paying a professional would
| have cost as much as the tax I was trying to avoid.
| bombcar wrote:
| You often have to correctly document each step (and I
| don't know if the law is "smart" enough yet to allow you
| to deduct the electricity charge unless you set the whole
| thing up as a 'company') and allow it to know the "cost
| basis" for each step.
| dboreham wrote:
| Just to clarify: there's no such thing as "US crypto
| taxes". There are taxes, levied on things like income and
| capital gains. Crypto transactions can constitute taxable
| events same as trading any other kind of asset can.
|
| In this case it sounds like this TaxBit software is buggy
| / not full featured and shouldn't be relied upon. Same
| applies in some cases to TurboTax also, but you'd think
| it would be possible to handle such a simple scenario
| correctly.
| mminer237 wrote:
| You would get taxed twice, but it wouldn't stack. If you
| earned $15 of Bitcoin, you'd get $15 added onto your tax
| bill at payout. Then if Bitcoin jumped to $20 and you
| sold it a couple months later, you'd have the $5
| difference of short-term capital gains taxes added on
| then.
| yebyen wrote:
| When you count your income from mining, you need to
| create an equal cost basis at that time. The value of the
| coins when you received them is your cost basis. If you
| didn't do that, you paid way too much in taxes.
|
| (If you hold them for longer than a year before you sell
| them, you can be paying long-term capital gains which is
| cheaper than short-term. Unless you're in losses in which
| case it doesn't matter.)
| hattmall wrote:
| Taxes can't make you lose money. You're taxes are a percent
| of the profit. That's how it works. You can't be forced
| into unprofitability because of taxes, but your profits
| will decrease by whatever percentage of profit your tax
| rate is.
| blobbers wrote:
| They don't factor in the electricity you pay for to get
| the coin. So when you get your tax bill for $20 of btc,
| and you paid $15 in electricity to get it, you still owe
| federal and state taxes on the $20, not the $5. If you
| set it up as a business you might be able to write off
| electricity.
|
| See: https://www.bitcointaxsolutions.com/blog/can-i-
| deduct-mining....
| medvezhenok wrote:
| If you listed it as a side business you should also be able
| to deduct the electricity expense (and the cost of the GPU,
| depreciated over some expected lifetime) as a business
| expense against the revenue you made from mining.
|
| You pay income tax on the crypto when you mine it at the
| market value at the time of mining - then your cost basis
| becomes the price that you paid (for future gain + loss
| computations).
|
| The reporting requirement is quite annoying, so for a
| single card/rig it's probably not worth it - but should
| still make money.
|
| There shouldn't ever be a case where you have to pay more
| in tax than you made mining (with one exception: you keep
| your mining income in crypto and the crypto tanks).
| vel0city wrote:
| IANAL but to my understanding its kind of a stretch to call
| it double-taxed.
|
| Note: the below is assuming you're doing this mining
| activity as a private person and not setting it up as a
| separate legal entity like an LLC or something.
|
| Simplifying, lets say 1BTC==$1USD at time of NiceHash
| payout, and you received 10 bitcoin. You'd then pay
| something like your regular income tax rate, lets say 30%
| on that. So the tax on mining income was $3. You'd still
| potentially have 10BTC, assuming you paid the tax with
| other dollars on hand instead of instantly selling.
|
| Then crypto goes up from 1BTC==$1 to 1BTC==$1.50. Your
| crypto is now worth 10 * 1.5 = $15USD. When you go to sell,
| you don't pay tax on the full $15 you just pay the tax on
| the gains, $5. So you'd pay the capital gains tax, probably
| 15% to you, on that $5 so $0.75USD.
|
| You don't pay the capital gains tax rate on the entire
| value of your crypto, only the gain in value. So from a USD
| perspective you didn't get double taxed. You had an income
| of $10, then you had an "income" of $5 when you realized
| the gains. That's two different taxable events, not a
| single one. If you exchanged the BTC to USD immediately at
| the distribution, you wouldn't of had a capital gains tax
| as you wouldn't have theoretically experienced any
| gains/losses on that distribution.
|
| IANAL, this is not tax advice, I am entirely a lay person.
| If I'm wrong _please_ correct me.
| bombcar wrote:
| What happens is tax software, unless specifically told
| (and some will ask) will assign a cost-basis of $0 to
| something it doesn't know about, which makes the whole
| $15 appear as a capital gain.
| yebyen wrote:
| This exactly. Unless you're using a suite that's
| specifically built for crypto traders, there's no way the
| software can know that income on day X (which you pay
| income tax on) is from the same bucket that an asset as
| was sold later on day Y.
|
| You have to tell the software about your cost basis,
| which is only a problem if you're mining. It's smart
| enough to figure out buying and selling on the same
| platform, but it is not smart enough to figure out that
| some income was related to later sales and track your
| cost basis unless you make those connections yourself.
| j0hnyl wrote:
| This is why I paid a firm to do my crypto
| reconciliation... which too costs an arm and a leg.
| yebyen wrote:
| Yeah if you're in for a penny you're in for a pound as
| they say. Sometimes I think that most of the algorithms
| should just go away and we should just trade 10 times a
| year, from a spreadsheet. Then I remember that those
| algorithms all came from the primordial spreadsheet soup,
| and just laugh.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| > ..and then I discovered US crypto taxes, which triggered on
| every single incremental payout from the mining pool I used
|
| How much were you earning off a single GPU? Surely low enough
| to fit under your standard deduction?
| ar-nelson wrote:
| There was probably a way I could have figured out how to keep
| the profits, but because I only made a few hundred from
| mining, and I had other capital gains (from stocks) that made
| that whole part of my taxes complicated, it just wasn't worth
| the effort and the risk of an audit to try to find a
| loophole. I printed the forms from TaxBit and paid what it
| said.
|
| People say that US taxes are kept complicated because the tax
| prep companies profit, or because Republican politicians
| benefit from frustration at taxes. But I think this is a
| bigger reason: a lot of people, myself included, when faced
| with paying extra taxes that just "don't seem right", would
| rather pay extra that go through the complication of figuring
| out how to fix them. So the government gets extra tax revenue
| that they _technically_ didn 't require.
| ctvo wrote:
| > People say that US taxes are kept complicated because the
| tax prep companies profit, or because Republican
| politicians benefit from frustration at taxes. But I think
| this is a bigger reason: a lot of people, myself included,
| when faced with paying extra taxes that just "don't seem
| right", would rather pay extra that go through the
| complication of figuring out how to fix them. So the
| government gets extra tax revenue that they technically
| didn't require.
|
| So you think people overpay more commonly when faced with
| complexity and confusion in the tax code vs. underpaying or
| not paying at all? Is that right?
|
| Also the confusion you're describing is also what drives
| your first reason:
|
| > People say that US taxes are kept complicated because the
| tax prep companies profit
|
| People need to use professional services because they're
| not sure.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| It's pretty well acknowledged that the American tax
| system is heavily under the influence of lobbyists from
| tax filing companies like Intuit. You don't see these
| sorts of problems in other countries for individual or
| self employment taxes
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| The tax code is too complex. I've consulted professional
| tax accountants three times over the last decade.
| Professionals don't understand it either.
|
| The first one was an oaf in Los Angeles that charged me
| $500 to redo a back-of-the-envelope calculation I had
| already done.
|
| The second one was an older lady in Silicon Valley. You
| would think she would have known how ISOs work, but she
| messed up the calculations anyway. There were no
| penalties, but she felt bad enough that she filed my
| taxes for free. She got cancer and retired 6 months
| later.
|
| The third was a friend that prepares taxes for
| billionaires. His retainer is something like $15K per
| year. His software's calculations disagreed with my
| homemade spreadsheet by $40K. In April my spreadsheet
| ended up within a few thousand of TurboTax. He's still
| kicking himself over that...
| smeyer wrote:
| If you're working a fulltime job, you're very likely to
| already be well over the standard deduction. It still sounds
| like the commenter doesn't fully understand the tax situation
| and might have paid more than they truly owed, but I can't
| imagine they'd owe $0 on the profits if they're in the US
| unless they had minimal other income that year.
| ghaff wrote:
| In the US, especially absent a large mortgage or
| significant charitable deductions, it's very possible--even
| probable--that, given tax changes about five years ago,
| you're within your standard deduction. I certainly am in a
| normal year.
| patricklorio wrote:
| I'm confused, taxes only apply to profit and you can write off
| the expenses of the video card.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > you can write off the expenses of the video card.
|
| As a random person who buys a graphic card to mine coin you
| can deduct the card price ?
| bombcar wrote:
| Only if you are a "business" and using it for business
| purposes. And the IRS has all sorts of things to detect a
| hobby vs a business - https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/earning-
| side-income-is-it-a-hob...
|
| So for example if you build a workshop in your garage and
| start making fine wood items, even if you sell them it may
| not be a business, and count as a hobby.
|
| Usually the IRS is trying to find people with "perpetually
| money-losing businesses that are deducting each year" but
| you could get caught up in some cases.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| They might not have known that. You'd be surprised how often
| people say "Taxes completely wiped out my profits becuase I
| didn't realize I could deduct my expenses!" Also, in some
| industries, like marijuana distribution, you really can't
| deduct a lot of your expenses.
| thealfreds wrote:
| If it was with a single card there probably isn't enough
| expense to go over the standard deduction.
| teraflop wrote:
| Your ability to deduct business expenses using Schedule C
| has nothing to do with the standard deduction. (And if
| you don't treat it as a business expense, you probably
| can't deduct it no matter what.)
| projektfu wrote:
| That's not how that works. For business expenses you put
| business income against expenses on schedule C. Only the
| net income is considered for taxes. Many people think
| they need to do something special to have a business but
| you don't. However, it can be a good idea to create a
| free EIN for the business and maintain real books (using
| ledger, for example, or by hand) and a separate checking
| account.
| benj111 wrote:
| Why not?
|
| I assume we're talking legal distribution else you wouldn't
| be paying taxes anyway
| CrazyStat wrote:
| > else you wouldn't be paying taxes anyway
|
| That's how they get you.
|
| NC sells "unauthorized substance" tax stamps, which you
| can buy (in theory) anonymously with cash, to pay your
| taxes on income from illegal distribution.
|
| Mostly it's an excuse to extract money from people who
| (obviously) didn't pay their drug taxes [1].
|
| [1] https://ncpolicywatch.com/2021/06/28/the-nc-drug-tax-
| is-desi...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Seriously, there should be a way of challenging a
| conviction for not paying this tax (or any other tax), if
| the way to pay the tax is reasonably impossible to use
| for an average human.
|
| I'd be fine with it if you could buy these stickers at
| any random store/kiosk/post office (like the tax stamps
| in Croatia that got phased out last year [1]), if you
| could mail-order them in advance, or if you could pay
| them online, _and_ there was a written rule that not just
| makes it a misdemeanor for DoR staff to forward data, but
| outright poisons the whole investigation.
|
| [1] https://www.expatincroatia.com/what-is-a-tax-stamp-
| and-why-d...
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| The IRS makes it really easy to just say you owe money
| and pay them, without saying much about why you owe them
| money. So there really isn't an excuse. I assume the NC
| system is for state taxes, not federal. For the IRS, you
| just put some numbers down and they usually won't ask for
| specific details. Later, if you get caught, the IRS will
| ask if you paid your taxes, and...if you did, they won't
| get you for tax evasion.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| There is no "legal distribution" of marijuana in federal
| law, and it's the federal law that's most of the tax
| burden. The federal law simply does not allow you to
| deduct expenses on marijuana business.
| benj111 wrote:
| But if you have a business selling whatever, you have
| expenses. Why does the federal tax agency even care what
| you're doing to make that money?
|
| I assume federal law doesn't actively say it's illegal,
| and I assume federal law doesn't exhaustively list what
| can be an expense or not, so if your business is
| incurring a legitimate expense?
|
| Further. Who decides what you are selling. Yes it may be
| marijuana in the box, but if there are other value added
| things, surely you could argue that that is an incidental
| ingredient, and you're really selling fancy packaging.
|
| For a country where it's all about free enterprise etc.
| Things are half made awkward. In the UK if you have a
| legitimate business expense related to your business you
| can expense it. And setting up a business basically
| involves getting a tax number to do your tax return.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| It's illegal:
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/280E
|
| _No deduction or credit shall be allowed for any amount
| paid or incurred during the taxable year in carrying on
| any trade or business if such trade or business (or the
| activities which comprise such trade or business)
| consists of trafficking in controlled substances (within
| the meaning of schedule I and II of the Controlled
| Substances Act) which is prohibited by Federal law or the
| law of any State in which such trade or business is
| conducted._
|
| Under federal law, marijuana is Schedule 1. While it is
| used in medical treatment in some states, this use is not
| legal federally. https://www.dea.gov/drug-
| information/drug-scheduling
|
| _Schedule I drugs, substances, or chemicals are defined
| as drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a
| high potential for abuse. Some examples of Schedule I
| drugs are: heroin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD),
| marijuana (cannabis), 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine
| (ecstasy), methaqualone, and peyote._
|
| Those in the business of selling marijuana are doing so
| illegally in the hopes the federal government continues
| to not enforce the law. :(
| benj111 wrote:
| So they're breaking the law by selling drugs? I assume
| they aren't paying taxes anyway then?!?
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Yes, they are breaking laws by selling drugs. No, they
| still pay taxes. The reason is that the federal drug
| enforcement agency that could go after them for breaking
| the low most likely will _not_ do that, whereas IRS
| highly likely _will_ go after them for not paying the
| taxes.
| jmalicki wrote:
| If you're not incorporated, business expenses are only
| deductible if they exceed 2% of AGI[0, p2], so for a hobbyist
| miner it is quite plausible that they can't write it off.
|
| [0] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p529.pdf
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| _Not tax advice_
|
| If you're just some average person, no, you aren't writing
| off the expenses. You should just add it to Schedule 1 line
| 8z "Other Income" and write "crypto mining" as what it is
| from. If you're just some average person, the actual tax on
| that money is going to be something like 10-15%.
|
| You can save a lot of time and effort: If it's not
| profitable when you pay your taxes, it isn't profitable.
| It's a hobby.
| xur17 wrote:
| Not tax advice, but I'm pretty sure you can just file it
| under a Schedule C as business income, and then you
| definitely can deduct the expenses from the business income
| with no 2% minimum.
| dboreham wrote:
| Quick note since it wasn't totally clear from the sibling
| comments that this is totally wrong. The cited document is
| describing a completely different kind of "deduction" for a
| completely different reason and has nothing at all to do
| with the ability to "deduct" business costs from profits.
| The underlying principle is that only profits from business
| activity are taxable, not gross income.
|
| In case anyone is wondering, the cited document discusses
| _unreimbursed_ _employee_ expenses. This means something
| like: you used your guest room as an office to perform
| remote work for your employer, and they didn't give you any
| rent for that space. In some times past you could actually
| pay less tax by declaring that you had rented your guest
| room to your employer but they hadn't paid you the rent,
| and so that's now a loss to you upon which you don't pay
| tax. This document says "nope, you can't do that any more".
| brudgers wrote:
| I recommend using an accountant.
|
| I am not one.
|
| However, my understanding is that all of this might be best
| handled as a Sole Proprietorship and filed using Schedule C
| - Profit and Loss from a Business.
| gjs278 wrote:
| albxxdx wrote:
| Trough all 2019, and also in 2020 you could buy a RX470 4GB used
| for $70 including shipping at Aliexpress...
| _puk wrote:
| Haha. I bought a brand new 1050 for one of the kid's builds
| (For a system that would happily run Minecraft) from eBay.
| Pretty much a year to the day it suddenly wouldn't be
| recognised by the Nvidia drivers on booting.
|
| Turned out it had a hacked firmware.
|
| I now only buy my graphics cards from reputable sources..
| rasz wrote:
| you bought gts450
| mawadev wrote:
| I don't buy a new gpu when it's too expensive. I don't play a
| game when my current gpu can't run it. I may be boring, but I
| don't see much difference in graphics quality compared to 5 or 10
| years ago... Software seems to just have gotten worse. Whenever I
| buy new hardware, I feel like I'm indirectly part of the problem,
| where devs are forced to cut corners bc of budget and time
| constraints as they're shipping low par software.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| I went to buy a k620 six months ago. It was $100. It's back
| down to $30, like it was 2 years ago. So I've definitely seen
| movement, just maybe not at the top?
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Software has definitely gotten worse, and tbh it will only keep
| getting worse. I really like this talk by [the possibly
| notorious] Jonathan Blow on the software industry and software
| in general decomposing [1].
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
| thrillgore wrote:
| I think an investigation is needed because I feel like Nvidia and
| AMD are price fixing, and we're not having a whole lot of luck
| with competitors in the space.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I hate crypto because now a good graphics card costs as much as a
| decent cpu/board/ram combined.
| albxxdx wrote:
| Give it 2 months, I'm pretty sure price will drop a lot.
| fallat wrote:
| Not for much longer: between the merge, the chip shortage end
| in sight, and competitors, things are going to get better.
| Tenoke wrote:
| I still find it hard to believe that creating demand for
| something is bad for its future. Should I hate gamers for
| driving demand for my consumer card which I buy for machine
| learning?
| VintageCool wrote:
| Steady demand (ie gamers) is good for making investments into
| the future. A massive flood of temporary demand (ie crypto)
| is dangerous. If they make huge investments to be able to
| meet crypto demand and it disappears in two years, then the
| manufacturers are overextended (probably on loans); they
| might go under when the flood abates or they might drive
| prices down to levels which cannot sustain future investment.
| The flood of crypto demand also harms their steady market of
| gamers: witness how much resentment has been expressed toward
| crypto and Nvidia in this thread.
| mping wrote:
| Most of the time, 1 gamer = 1 card; for crypto, it's like a
| dozen guys run hundreds if not thousands of GPUs. It's
| basically hoarding a finite resource.
| Ekaros wrote:
| No, you should thank them for giving constant demand for
| consumer products. Without them you would be paying
| enterprise prices for the same cards...
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| If gamers ever cause GPU stock to be unavailable for
| literally years and drive prices up to triple their msrp,
| yes. Then you can be mad at gamers.
| Tenoke wrote:
| While the shortages are real I've bought GPUs during those
| years, never for even 2x MSRP (though obviously more than
| MSRP). Prices have also surely increased due to gamers at
| times (even if less so) without me hating them, and MSRP
| has clearly been set quite low compared to costs and the
| past - look at EVGA barely managing to profit by selling at
| the prices set by NVIDIA which would hardly be due to the
| increased demand.
|
| At any rate, I'm just not convinced that the extra demand
| for years isn't good for the GPU industry - e.g. I'd
| imagine 10 years down the line the GPU industry to be
| better off in the world in which it had increased demand
| for years over the world where it didn't. Hell, maybe it
| even directly helped with scaling up for the increasing ML
| demand.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "EVGA barely managing to profit
|
| ...
|
| Hell, maybe it even directly helped with scaling up for
| the increasing ML demand."
|
| This makes no sense. Any architecture 10 years in the
| future would be different and require retooling. It's
| also yet to be seen what demand ML will even generate in
| 10 years (it's been all the rage for the last 10 and
| we're nowhere close to those predictions). The money
| would be one that I could agree with helping in the
| future, but similar to what you said profit forecasts are
| low, so they won't even have that.
| Tenoke wrote:
| EVGA's profits might've been low but as far as I can see
| NVIDIA's profit and growth has increased significantly
| since Ethereum launched[0] and money today helps with R&D
| for tomorrow (and R&D budgets have increased even more).
|
| 0. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/
| revenu...
| giantg2 wrote:
| Sure, but if I remember correctly they are giving
| shareholder guidance that the future profits look bleak.
| Again, this is a big bubble mostly caused by crypto.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| > At any rate, I'm just not convinced that the extra
| demand for years isn't good for the GPU industry
|
| The demand disappeared last Thursday night.
| omegalulw wrote:
| It's not about creating demand. It's about creating wild
| swings in demand AND supply. Miners buy en masse when
| profitable and sell when not. That's what messes up the
| market. Gamers won't do that.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Your example isn't the same. The manufacturers wouldn't be
| able to do enough volume to bring down card prices for AI
| without gamers. The gamers are actually bringing your price
| down.
|
| This is a bubble created mostly by crypto that is driving
| prices up because their demand greatly exceeds supply.
| concinds wrote:
| You're right. $NVDA went from $2.6B in R&D for FY2019 to
| $6.3B for FY2022; and they've done a few cloud acquisitions
| in the meantime. They'll go through a tough period, sales
| wise, as the market gets flooded with second-hand stuff, but
| their fundamentals are solid.
| [deleted]
| a_f wrote:
| Wait until you see some of the new motherboard prices for AMDs
| AM5 platform. The top end rivals that of the new graphics cards
| baybal2 wrote:
| guilhas wrote:
| The post seems to be talking about the unbranded Chinese cards. I
| have never tried those, not sure if it was the same
| performance/drivers. But in 2019 bought a RX570 on ebay to 150$
| and sold it next year for the same. They're a bit cheaper now,
| but its price range does not allow much change. More expensive
| cards have more variation
| scrlk wrote:
| Are there any reliability issues with used mining cards?
|
| AFAIK most miners undervolted their cards to maximise
| profitability vs. power/cooling requirements. Would applying new
| thermal paste + replacing fans on the cooler be enough?
| dimman wrote:
| Not necessarily more than any other card. As long as it's been
| running within component specs (especially temperatures), I
| wouldn't be worried.
|
| It's obviously been running fine under high loads, so why would
| it just decide to stop working fine?
|
| I think the major issue is that many cards have been running
| outside of specs for a long time. High loads tends to increase
| the risk of that, so the problem lies in figuring out the case
| for the card you're interested in.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| > It's obviously been running fine under high loads, so why
| would it just decide to stop working fine?
|
| I think most people don't really get how durability works
| with solid state electronics. It makes sense that a truck
| used under high loads for 2 years straight is going to show
| some issues. If I was buying a used tube guitar amp and the
| seller told me it had been left continously playing a test
| tone at maximum volume for years I'd assume the tubes and
| speaker cone are F'd.
|
| The idea of "it's been running fine for 2 years under high
| load, so that's a good sign it will continue to run" is
| correct but very unintuitive.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > Are there any reliability issues with used mining cards?
|
| Yes.
|
| Specifically, voltage regulators tend - for some reason I am
| not familar with - wear out and die.
|
| I'd be very careful when buying a second-hand GPU that was used
| for mining.
|
| > Would applying new thermal paste + replacing fans on the
| cooler be enough?
|
| Doubtful.
| timtom39 wrote:
| Yes but I have owned several with no issues. I usually will
| only buy from sellers who have lots of positive feedback. New
| sellers have nothing to lose.
| scambier wrote:
| There's a nice Linus Tech Tips video about this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKqVvXTanzI
|
| The tl;dw is that used cards don't perform worse than new cards
| - your card either works, or it doesn't. But like any
| electronics, they have an "expiration date", and if it's been
| used for 2 years, it's 2 years closer to dying. It's up to you
| to decide if the discount of a used card might be worth it.
| benj111 wrote:
| But what's the bathtub curve on GPUs though?
|
| I'm guessing like most electronics, if they don't break in
| the first few months, they'll probably last until they're
| thrown away.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Depends how long until you throw them away.
|
| A bathtub curve needs to come back up, right?
| benj111 wrote:
| Yes. And when was the last time you had a processor fail,
| or ram, or motherboard?
|
| I've had one motherboard on a laptop go. And that was due
| to flexing at the hinge. Everything else was mechanical,
| and I keep pcs for longer than average. My current laptop
| is 7 years old I believe.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Everything fails eventually, and I agree, usually once
| they're a certain age they keep going a while.
|
| How many I've had fail? Or how many I've replaced?
|
| I worked for a few years in a warranty depot doing
| desktop and laptop repair. I've replaced a lot of parts
| outside of that first few months.
|
| I keep my stuff around a good long time too.
|
| I replaced a 5 year old GPU in my desktop just this
| spring. Tossed a desktop motherboard that would no longer
| POST with known good parts this summer that was probably
| about 7 years old. A couple of laptops hit the recycle
| bin last year because their screens stopped displaying a
| picture, but it wasn't physical damage or the cable. They
| were probably close to 8 years old.
|
| Stuff happens, as they say.
| zajio1am wrote:
| > The tl;dw is that used cards don't perform worse than new
| cards - your card either works, or it doesn't.
|
| For electronics, it is often not just "either works, or it
| doesn't", but there is also decreased reliability (increased
| rate of random crashes and restarts). We ran many PCs as
| routers in often inadequate temperature conditions and that
| was pretty common failure mode.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Was going to say, "it either works or it doesn't" doesn't
| even match my experience using home routers at obviously
| tiny scale. Every router needs a reboot sometimes, question
| is how often. My parents' router is on a lamp timer now to
| ensure it reboots daily. Amortized like 1 "9" of
| reliability. A better one maybe gets 3 "9"s.
| lottin wrote:
| Nonsense. I bought an RX570 in April 2019 and it cost me EUR210,
| or about $235.
| thro388 wrote:
| RX470 and RX480 are quite nice cards for Linux workstation.
| Support for 5 displays, and most importantly great opensource
| drivers. I am buying couple...
| 7speter wrote:
| Any AMD card is really. RX6600's are 2x as powerful as rx480s,
| and are approaching 200 dollars. Dunno about their workstation
| ability though
| zekica wrote:
| My PowerColor Fighter RX6600 works completely fine on Ubuntu
| 22.04. No stability issues at all, and even ROCm works. The
| GPU itself supports 5 simultaneous displays but the card has
| only 4 outputs: 3 DP 1.4a and 1 HDMI 2.1
| 7speter wrote:
| Well, I'm saying it may not perform for workstation
| workloads as well as nvidia cards, because cuda, but I also
| dont know how well supported workstation/pro features are
| with nvidia cards on Linux.
| thro388 wrote:
| Older kernels may not work with newest AMD cards. Some old
| Debian stable, CentOS and so on. RX 480 is sure bet!
| superkuh wrote:
| I also remember the Riva TNT2 and Vooodoo 2 being released in the
| late 90s/early-00s for $230-$300. Big prices on video cards are
| not a new thing.
| Kukumber wrote:
| I bought the RX580 (card that i'm still using) at 100 too from
| ebay few years ago
|
| I will not buy one of these new overpriced cards, hopefully mine
| will last long enough to see correct prices again
|
| I don't game that much anymore so screw them
| mnd999 wrote:
| That's roughly equivalent to my aging Nvidia 970, I think and
| that's also mostly fine. The price of new cards is still
| ridiculous afaict.
| nani8ot wrote:
| I bought a 1060 for 300EUR in the mining boom in 2017 and later
| switched to an RX580 for 100EUR (sold and bought). Now I'm
| thinking of buying a new GPU if the prices are down enough for
| me to justify it.
|
| The RX580 just isn't enough for my 1440p@144Hz E.g. I had to
| use FSR 1.0 with Ghostrunner to achieve the 100+ fps I want.
| And that just doesn't look good enough. For my Steam Deck 40Hz
| is fine, since I play with joysticks.
| causi wrote:
| Yeah, with all this "GPU prices are falling woo-hoo" people seem
| to be forgetting they're still paying above MSRP for cards that
| are both two years old _and_ were overpriced on launch. I bought
| an EVGA 1070 SC shortly after launch and paid $400. If Nvidia
| thinks I 'm going to fork over $600 for a two year old 3070 they
| can sit and spin.
| papichulo4 wrote:
| MSI's 3090 Ti was hovering around $1099 on Amazon, new-in-box,
| last week. Nobody should buy a used 3070 for $600 - brand new
| ones are ~$550 right now: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=rtx+3070
| bee_rider wrote:
| I vaguely recall like 10 years you could get a then-decent GPU
| for like $120. But maybe I'm comparing against, like, the
| "best-buy special" slightly out of date card or something. I
| wonder if some of that market has been wiped out by the slow
| creep of iGPU performance.
| Tepix wrote:
| I think most people are aware that the prices need to come down
| another 50% or more until we're approaching "cheap".
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Wouldn't we expect a similar price increase over the last 5
| years, if only due to inflation and the 25% tariff?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| You'd expect that increase to be applied to a significant
| discount for the card being two years old.
|
| Also the tariff was paused 6 months ago, retroactively
| refunding back to 11 months ago. It should have minimal
| effect on current stock.
| themitigating wrote:
| Nvidia only sets a MSRP not the selling price which the
| manufacturer sets.
| apocalyptic0n3 wrote:
| That's not true. NVIDIA sets a min and max price range you
| can sell at (both to board partners AND to retail partners).
| LTT has talked about it at length in the past, including on
| last week's WAN Show. It was also cited by EVGA last week as
| one of the reasons they opted to stop selling GPUs.
| themitigating wrote:
| Han told the YouTubers that NVIDIA had stopped treating
| EVGA as a true partner over the years despite their
| history. https://www.engadget.com/evga-is-leaving-the-gpu-
| market-and-...
|
| 1.NVIDIA had allegedly stopped informing EVGA about new
| product announcements and important information, such as
| suggested retail pricing and availability
|
| 2.NVIDIA's first-party Founders Edition cards undercut the
| prices of their counterparts from EVGA and other partners,
| forcing the vendors to mark down their prices.
|
| Do you have a source?
| 0xAFFFF wrote:
| Nvidia does set the price for Founders Edition cards sold
| under their own name though, although they only account for a
| small part of the overall card supply.
| deelowe wrote:
| Nvidia sets the price for all cards that use their chips as
| part of their OEM agreements. Partners used to get around
| this by doing things such as adding more memory, OC, and
| other features which allowed them to charge a premium in
| those cases. Nvidia has clamped own on this over the years.
| It's gotten so bad that EVGA famously stopped all GPU
| development this year in reaction to the declining margins
| and increasing hostility from Nvidia.
| folkrav wrote:
| The point is MSRP used to be a relatively safe assumption of
| selling price (AFAIK it also has been for quite a while), and
| now it's way lower than what we actually end up paying.
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| Given the recent evga split, this is actually not the case.
| Nvidia has contracts to provide them with a great deal of
| control over end user pricing.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| Nvidia literally mandates the pricing their "partners" can
| sell each card ( it's an interval )
|
| It's widely known Nvidia is a bitch to work with. It has been
| "fine" because Nvidia was pretty much the only game in town
| and because of Bitcoin/Covid/floods/locusts/etc the prices
| have been ridiculous for years and everybody made their sweet
| money, now things are starting to become sane and the usual
| crocodiles are starting to cry..
|
| I don't feel pity for anyone, everybody other the the final
| real consumer made a lot of money.
| hot_gril wrote:
| > I don't feel pity for anyone, everybody other the the
| final real consumer made a lot of money.
|
| And most of the final real consumers just lost out on
| inexpensively running Minecraft shaders in 4K or whatever,
| so eh, life moves on.
| batuhanicoz wrote:
| I heard in the recent coverage of EVGA ending their
| partnership with NVIDIA and pulling out of the GPU market
| that NVIDIA not only sets the MSRP, they also set floor and
| ceiling for the selling prices.
|
| Also, EVGA CEO claimed that it wouldn't be feasible compete
| with NVIDIA's pricing for Founder's Edition cards, which are
| usually cheaper.
| kurikuri wrote:
| Sure, NVIDIA sets an MSRP, but that MSRP is a sticker price
| given to consumers and not representative of what the
| manufacturers pay for the chips themselves. Manufacturers
| need to make somewhat of a profit, but NVIDIA has encroached
| on this profit from its manufacturers since the 10-series
| came out. JayzTwoCents on YouTube recently discussed this
| while reporting on a meeting he had with EVGA's CEO about
| EVGA's recent break with NVIDIA [1].
|
| When the 10-series came about, NVIDIA launched the a limited
| run of the founder's edition graphics cards at $100 above
| MSRP. Before the 10-series graphics cards, NVIDIA didn't sell
| cards themselves and went out of its way to make this seem as
| if this was a limited edition sort of product. Then the
| 20-series came out with a continuous run of founder's edition
| cards which were priced at MSRP, directly competing with
| their previous board partners.
|
| Tie this along with the previous attempts to strongarm
| manufacturers via GPP and chip supply allocations, and I tend
| to give the gift of charity to the manufacturers and not
| NVIDIA.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12Hcbx33Rb4&t=61s
| paulmd wrote:
| I love this alt-history, because the contemporary view at
| the time was that the 10-series MSRP was "fake", that it
| was impossible to find cards under the $700 MSRP, and that
| the whole thing was a scheme from NVIDIA to market a lower
| number than you could pay in practice and upcharge for the
| blower cooler.
|
| Partner cards were stacking up in the $725-800 range for 6
| months after launch, so they came in above the MSRP, which
| people justified because they were "premium cards". Very
| few vendors offered any products at the actual MSRP, EVGA
| had one that was "only" $20 above MSRP and Zotac had
| something similar and those two low-cost models were
| impossible to find for a long time.
|
| Now it has gone from "NVIDIA wants to upcharge you for a
| blower cooler" and it's a dastardly plan from NVIDIA to
| undercut partners.
|
| everyone is real riled up by that EVGA ceo's tantrum but
| even GN told you to take it with a grain of salt, and other
| board partners have confirmed that in the last 2 years
| they've been running 10x their usual profits due to mining.
| The EVGA ceo spinning it like partners been losing hundreds
| of dollars per card for years now is false and untrue.
| Being a partner is generally around 10% margin and even a
| smaller partner like EVGA should be able to get around 5%.
| Losing hundreds of dollars per card is something that
| happened in like, the last month, partners made very
| healthy margins selling into the mining boom, and the CEO
| is being disingenuous by pretending that they've lost a
| bunch of money on it/are running super low margins. Mining
| was great for margins.
|
| https://www.igorslab.de/en/evga-pulls-the-plug-with-loud-
| ban...
| maltalex wrote:
| Consider AMD.
|
| If you don't need NVIDIA specific features (e.g. ray tracing
| performance, CUDA), you can get the same level of performance
| [0] offered by a 3070 for around 350$-450$ in the form of an RX
| 6700/RX 6750 XT [1][2]. You also get more VRAM with these cards
| - 12GB instead of the 8GB of the 3070.
|
| [0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-
| hierarchy,4388.html
|
| [1]:
| https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=6700+xt&Order=1&N=4841%2010000...
|
| [2]:
| https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=6750+xt&Order=1&N=100007709&is...
| kyriakos wrote:
| for just gaming AMD is the way to go if you are on a tight
| budget. they had driver issues which are now fixed so they
| offer both good performance and price. too bad all ML stuff
| require CUDA :(
| causi wrote:
| Sadly I do much of my gaming over Moonlight which is Nvidia-
| exclusive and beats the pants off Steam Link. Also I find the
| AMD naming conventions somewhat confusing and I can never
| judge the relative performance of an AMD card by its model
| number.
| maltalex wrote:
| > Also I find the AMD naming conventions somewhat confusing
| and I can never judge the relative performance of an AMD
| card by its model number
|
| It's really quite simple and very similar to NVIDIA's
| naming scheme.
|
| First digit is the generation (currently 6XXX)
|
| Second digit is the relative performance (64XX < 65XX <
| 66XX < 67XX < 68XX < 69XX)
|
| "XT" suffix - similar to NVidia's "Super" designation. Non-
| Zero third digit is like Nvidia's "Ti" designation: 6600 <
| 6600 XT < 6650 XT.
| lhl wrote:
| I'm a huge Moonlight fan so this is an issue for me as
| well, but just an FYI, a lot of people have good luck with
| Sunshine https://github.com/loki-47-6F-64/sunshine - which
| is a Moonlight compatible host that uses ffmpeg (and works
| w/ AMD cards).
|
| I'm in the market for an upgrade and will wait until Nov 3
| to see what RDNA3 brings to see if it's worth paying for a
| new card vs last-gen used card pricing.
| causi wrote:
| How does the latency compare to Moonlight? I'm lag-
| sensitive to the point GeForce Now is immediately
| nauseating in first-person games.
| eikenberry wrote:
| I've used Steam's remote play/streaming setup for years
| without issue. What makes Moonlight better?
| Semaphor wrote:
| Recently bought a RX 6600 for (EUR/$ 285), very happy besides
| not being able to (easily at least) try out stable fusion ;)
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| You may be able to by building PyTorch with ROCm bindings.
| Liquix wrote:
| AMD is also the way to go for non-Windows users. There are
| hopes that NVIDIA drivers will become usable in wake of the
| wake of Lapsus$ hijinx, but for now AMD cards work _so_ much
| better with GNU /Linux
| jacooper wrote:
| The lapsus hack doesn't matter, no body is going to Read
| trade secret code.
|
| What actually matters is the announcement of an open source
| kernel driver, similar to how AMD does it, which will allow
| for third party drivers like Mesa to exist, instead of
| manually reverse engineering everything.
|
| https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-
| sourc...
| somerandomqaguy wrote:
| > Our strategy is to reduce the sell-in - reduce the sell-in
| this quarter, next quarter to let channel inventory correct.
| Obviously, we're off the highs and the macro condition turned
| sharply worse. And so, our first strategy is to reduce sell-in
| in the next couple of quarters to correct channel inventory.
| We've also instituted programs to price position our current
| products to prepare for next-generation products.
|
| -Jensen Huang, Nvidia Q2 Earnings Call to Investors.
| Paraphrased here: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-
| announces-prelimin...
|
| JayzTwoCents has a video that speculates on what it means:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15FX4pez1dw
|
| Short version though, Jay thinks NVidia's trying to reduce the
| supply of 3xxx cards on the market so that they can hopefully
| keep prices high-ish and position the 4xxx cards at a higher
| price bracket then the 3xxx, selling both at the same time.
| Melatonic wrote:
| *eyeroll*
|
| Looks like I will not be buying a new Nvidia anytime soon
| hot_gril wrote:
| They don't think _you 're_ going to buy it, but they know
| someone is going to.
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| Yup, iirc i paid $1600 _(or maybe $1800? I forget)_ for a new
| 3080TI. It hurt. However i 'd do it again if/when i need to.
| Ideally i won't for another few years, but you get me.
|
| Clearly i can afford to do this though. But this isn't just
| gaming either, i create CG on this machine, digitally sculpt,
| etc.
| paulmd wrote:
| is this a link to someone's reddit post lol
| senthilnayagam wrote:
| have a intel mac i9, stable diffusion with openvino take about 5
| minutes per prompt.
|
| looking to build a linux machine for stable diffusion, will watch
| out for good deals for RTX 3090 TI
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-09-20 23:02 UTC)