Bitcoin Forum

I just bought out the last 8 5830s from Newegg, I'm sure other vendors will follow. From what I can gather, nothing competes with it's price/Mhash on the market. Thoughts?

Will this play a significant role in reducing the expansion of the network?

LOL, I wonder if the gfx card vendors realise for why their cards are being sold so quickly, and in lots of more than 2 ?

Good thing I made my purchase yesterday... I was worried about waiting, and apparently rightly so.

Maybe temporarily.

From what I understand those particular 5830's were only recently manufactured by Sapphire as some kind of value series... since they all sold I am betting they will be making more despite them being an old model.

Even if not.. the 7000 series is not far off.. which should push the 6000's down in price.

Try tiger direct?

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=365456&Sku=P450-5837 (http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=365456&Sku=P450-5837)

This is like the 5th thread about this this morning. And no the network doesn't rely on 5830s to grow. There are roughly 16-20 million 58xx series cards in circulation. Neweggs stock of like 200 5830s isn't really the make or break for bitcoin.

TigerDirect and Amazon have 5830s for $130, the XFX not Sapphire. From my research the difference isn't significant. I grabbed another 16 from Amazon before they sell out too :p

Where can you buy them for $110?

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=365456&CatId=3669

TigerDirect has them for $99.99 with the mail in rebate (sucks I know, but it's $60 you'll get back later, right?)

Just grabbed 2, lots in stock apparently according to TD Customer Service.

I wonder the same thing myself -- why don't they hire extra shifts and crank out more of those bad babys?

That's good to know. When I put them in my cart it made it look like you could only use the rebate once.

--

"NOTICE: Limit (2) rebates per person, billing address, company, or household."

I suppose you could get around that pretty easily

so wait will my 5870 do good since ive been reading that 5830's are like the best card to mine??


sorry im a noob and i didnt mean for my 1st post to be this  :) i was actually going to post in a different thread but this one caught my eye  ;D

I just purchased 12 Sapphire 5830's from Newegg this morning, glad I made it before they sold out!

You may not be so glad in 10 days when you finally get your rigs running and difficulty doubles :D

this all kind of makes me giggle.  I know when bionic put out gpu stuff for crunching numbers there was a slight increase in card sales.... But I can't imagine there has ever been a increase in sales like this.   its completely insane how many vid cards have been purchased just because of bitcoins in the past few weeks...  should of got stock in these manufacturers

I did all my calculations a week ago and things look good, prices have more doubled since. bring on the difficulty increase :p

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison The 5830 is the best bang for your buck RIGHT NOW. I don't know what you paid for your 5870 but it's much better for mining than a 5830 ignoring cost

A simple estimate of the bitcoin community puts miners in the roughly 10-20,000 range. New card sales are likely less but even assuming an optimistic estimate, we'll say 20,000.

In the first 9 months after the 5xxx series was released, AMD sold 16million 5xxx chips. 20,000 / 16million = .1% Bitcoin is a drop in the bucket at the moment. I'm glad people are being optimistic about bitcoin, that's what it needs, but really let's keep things in perspective.

Nah, I shipped them next day air this morning with rush processing. I'll have them tomorrow.

Ooh yeah for sure overall its nothing.  But what I meant was just a average shopping time to see a huge spike in sales out of the blue.

edit: smiley after stock comment cuz was being funny.

Screw bitcoin :p I'm in it for the money

The 20,000 is probably pretty close to accurate, so if the 16M number sold is accurate why has there been such an impact on the video card market?  You can't reliably find 5850s, 5870s, 5970s, or 6990s in stock anywhere, and even 5830s are going.  If we're only .1% of the market, it shouldn't have had that big of an effect.  Does that mean there is like 50k G/hash in cards purchased recently and still waiting to come online?

It's possible, and I know I'm part of it since I bought 27 cards in the past week  ;)

Yeah it's NEVER been this hard to find such a large number of different current-gen cards.  We are definitely having a measurable effect

I just bought one from newegg too. :)

got it today.

waiting for the extender cable.

Hopefully, if these card are sold out, less people are willing to join mining since they will have to buy a much more expensive hardware. :)

Is the 20,000 miners or cards sold to miners? I personally have bought around 30 cards so far, other people who look at this as an investment are buying 5-10 without much hesitation. How many of the 16,000,000 cards are sitting in stores or in prebuilt computers waiting to be sold?

Most are sitting in gamers' PC's. They purchase the vast majority of all graphics cards.
The cards are also largely optimized for gaming; If they were optimized for OpenCL (besides it just being another feature) instead of gaming we'd be seeing double hash rates or better.

Well keep in mind that the 5xxx gpus are from late 2009: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Evergreen_%28GPU_family%29#Products

I wouldn't be surprised if the 5830s at Tiger Direct sell out soon  :o

If all those gamers found out about bitcoin, the hash rate could go to 5,000,000 Ghash/sec.

I seriously doubt that BTC mining has anything to do with the lack of 5000 cards. The line has been replaced with the 6000 line. Manufacturers have probably not been producing the 5000 cards for quite a while (the Sapphire being the exception as it was a revised version just released in April, 2011).

As long as the bitcoin value rises at a fair rate along w\ the difficulty, the difficulty really isn't too big of a deal.

Make 1 btc per day and it's worth $8 or make .5 bitcoins a day but they're worth $16...

That's exactly what I keep saying. It's hard to really argue whether mining difficulty and price are *actually* linked by the market or if they just *seem* like they are, but they tend to fluctuate within a certain range, sort of a homeostatic curve if you look at price/difficulty and difficulty/price ratios. To an extent I'd be willing to say that it's a simple supply/demand thing considering that we the miners are, in fact, the supply.

Pretty simple really, 5xxx series cards are all last gen. They stopped being produced/bought/stocked half a year (or more) ago. Look online for 6xxx gen cards, they are a little more expensive, don't hash quite as well, but they're still very good hashing cards, they are not out of stock anywhere. The reason is that this is what is being bought up and stocked by retailers, not older generation technology. The market is pushed by gamers, and gamers don't want old stuff, they want new stuff. We managed to scrape up the dregs of what was left over and unwanted.

There is a fairly large used card market, and thats where you'll find some older gen cards, though people are snapping those up now admittedly. But check ebay as an example, there are still > 100 5870s for sale on any given day. At bloated prices, but they're there.

But remember if that's true then just buying BTCs is way better than investing in hardware.  Difficulty is growing at like 30% a week, if BTCs keep pace with that than it would be the best investment ever.

I'm also betting that mining is not exponential but homeostatic as well. If we get to the point where the difficulty is too high, there will be less incentive for new miners to join and eventually incentives for old miners to quit, at which point the difficulty:price ratio will decrease again. Simply put, mining is a long-term investment; if you buy at $10 and sell at $20 who cares if the market crashes after, you made your money and got out. Buying is for those who want to make bank and don't care about the movement. Mining is for true believers.

That's beautiful Freakin.  ;D

I like the look of that straight line, which clearly states "bitcoin price is directly proportional to difficulty"

That's not true. That's only true if the number of coins you can mine are less than the number of coins you can buy for the same amount of money. At 30% difficulty increases mining rewards you much more greatly than buying. At 60% difficulty increases however buying rewards you more greatly. Assuming static increases of course.

If for example however difficulty precedes price you might lose out (that is to say if you buy mining hardware right before a large difficulty jump that precedes a corresponding price jump it could be different profitability)

And since there are both mathematically-minded people who will see this and choose to buy rather than mine as well as a sort of "evolutionary cost" associated with making the wrong decision to mine vs buy at the appropriate time, the number of miners will naturally decrease once this threshold is crossed. Mining will continue on a downward trend until it reaches another critical threshold at which point market evolution selects against buyers and mining increases once again.

A homeostatic curve created by market evolutionary selection between two opposing populations  8)

Well, I've been arguing that the simple growth model is wrong for some time now. I was merely pointing out that the advice "its more profitable to buy than mine because..." is often touted but is only correct under certain circumstances. Freakin's graph is awesome and helpful.

I don't know that it will necessarily hold true though in the future, so buyer beware.

Quite true, all markets have some element of inherent risk so definitely "caveat emptor"
That said, I'll keep on mining so long as it's at least paying the electric bill. I may not keep buying additional hardware but the rigs will keep doing their thing; not just because it's profitable, but because I believe in the project and want to see it succeed.

I can't claim credit for the graph, but it was too helpful to not share.  Very clear how correlated price:difficulty is.

Indeed. I would like to see it on a log-log scale though. Anyone can do that?

If anyone is desperate frys has 5830s@$129 (after $50 rebate)

don't bother asking about the 5850s they have "exhausted all available fulfillment resources"

Still some $235 5850's at Amazon, as of this post.

I was looking yesterday and they had 5850's and 5830's listed for the same price of $179.99. Only difference was $50 rebate for the 5830 and $40 rebate for the 5850.