Bitcoin Forum

Just curious: what is this piece of junk I keep seeing on ebay? Its not listed on the bitcoin wiki's hardware comparison (although some limited info on M2050 does) and the sellers ads hardly mentions anything about bitcoin or Mhash. Granted, this would be a ridiculous choice for a real miner, i mean $1200 for what...100 Mhash? It just makes me wonder why this thing even exists. It sure looks beefy. Makes me wonder if this thing is meant for graphics, and how crazy my gaming performance would be. Im assuming the seller loaded the auction title with "bitcoin generator" to attract attention, right?  ???

It's crap, stay away.

It's an nVidia card meant for grid computing--like Seti@home and the like, not bitcoin mining. I'm not sure it even can support a monitor. I think you're right about the seller's motives in advertising it--those things do serve a purpose, but neither bitcoin mining nor gaming is it.

The Tesla's were targeting graphics professionals like CAD Engineering or Architecture where there is a need to display large files without any hiccups.

I don't think Tesla is targeting CAD users. It's strictly for GPU computing.

The Tesla cards have no video outputs.  They support no monitors of any size.

http://www.nvidia.co.uk/docs/IO/92137/header_productshot1.png

They are computing engines.  They (like all NVidia products) just happen to be spectacurly bad at integer math which is what Bitcoin uses.  An AMD Tesla equivalent would be awesome for mining but AMD has no such product.

They are awesome for what they are intended to be used for .. double precision floating point HPC.

http://www.nas.nasa.gov/SC11/assets/images/content/27_Thompson_H_discover_1_big.jpg
For example NASA recently expanded one of their climate modeling super computers. It has 30K Intel CPU.  They added 64 (yeah just 64) Tesla processors and that provided the equivelent computing power as 10K more Intel CPUs.

Like I said they were being marketed to CAD, architects, and engineers. People who were designing large complex structures, like skyscrapers, space shuttles which may have included stress testing or analysis of some type. The Nvidia website even had a picture of an engineering PC setup which included 3 teslas with no monitor outs along with one card that had a monitor out. I was looking into distributed hash cracking with software that could scale to 260 nodes and researched this fairly well. Unfortunately Teslas were outside of my affordability @ $1200 for one.

Well that and its cracking performance is abysmal.  Less hashing power than a $200 AMD GPU.  I mean even if your budget did support that it would be an awful waste of resources.

http://www.golubev.com/gpuest.htm
http://whitepixel.zorinaq.com/

4x5970 can brute force 33 billion MD5 hashes per second.  It would take ~24 M2070 @ $1200 a piece to do the same thing.
$1,600 vs $28,000 for the same computing power?

Since brute force attack is perfectly parallel there is no reason for high inter-node connectivity.  A rack of 10 4x5970 rigs would give you 300 GH/s (MD5 not Bitcoin hashes).  A low powered supervisor node could assign sub ranges to each of the nodes and track progress.

Sorry for interjecting, but thanks for all your input. Nice to know we have some experts out there wiling volunteer their knowledge  :)

I guess this thread is saying that the Tesla is not suited at all to bitcoin mining perhaps. How about the AMD counterpart to the Tesla, I guess its the Firestream right? Is there any difference between Firestream to a Fire Pro or Radeon card besides the price and its intended design to the professional market?