Bitcoin Forum

These are my thoughts and a message to GPU Manufacturers:

GPU Manufacturers believe that they can stop miners from buying GPU's they want in the hands of Gamers by creating mining specific cards.

This is a great concept but there is one problem with this. GPU Manufacturers don't understand what miners want in a "mining" GPU.

GPU Manufacturers believe that they can pass off cheaper graphics cards that they produce without the "extras" built in for Gamers that miners don't need. In addition to this GPU manufactures believe they can pass off lower quality hardware at this reduced cost and get away with it by only offering a 3 month warranty for "mining".

The problem with this idea is that GPU manufacturers fundamentally don't understand miners or the mining community.

GPU Miners buy GPU's of value for mining but they also buy them knowing that they can resell them later and get some sort of return. If you turn a GPU into an "Asic Miner" that after a few generations doesn't hash at a rate that produces enough profits, just like old Antminer S1's and S3's, it becomes basically worthless at that point to anyone except a miner that can mine with it and still make a profit.

I ask this question of GPU Manufacturers: Why would any GPU miner want to buy a "mining" specific GPU that they know they are just going to probably throw away some day instead of resell to some gamer out there that might want it at a reduced cost?

Examples of things I would want in a "Mining" specific GPU - Better cooling options, more robust fans, High hardware durability testing, dust preventative designs, measures, coatings, etc., Dual Bios capability on all mining cards, unlocked voltage controls, mining specific driver support, bios customization support.

GPU Manufacturers: You bring something with the stuff I listed above to market, you'll really deliver something that miners would want and many miners would buy.

Unfortunately with what information is being leaked out so far, it looks like you're trying to pass off your low quality asics and lesser cost GPU designs as "mining" specific cards.

This simply will not do and I for one will just keep buying up your regular GPU's until there is a time that you deliver a "mining" specific GPU that really puts "Mining with a GPU" first.

My statement to any GPU Manufacturer that might be reading this: If you're going to make "mining" specific GPU's, you better bring something to the table that a miner would want. Otherwise, Miners like me are just going to pay a little more and keep buying up the GPU's you want to be in the hands of Gamers.

Agreed - the capabilities of a specific mining gpu must outweigh the lost scrap value since one cannot sell it on to the gaming or visualisation markets

Until that time, gaming cards will be the card of choice I believe simply due to their scrap value being taken into account when calculating lifetime ROI


Perhaps another point to add that would be desirable: compact size. The smaller the card the smaller the rig and the smaller the rig the more rigs one can fit into the space - thereby reducing the space a farm takes up (heat dissipation of course would need to remain unaffected.......)

The mining-specific GPUs are fake. I'm almost 100% sure. All the evidence comes from shady sources, the pictures all look fake, even the "real" ones. Someone is trying to influence the price of altcoins or the gpu mining card market.

The new mining specific GPUs are said to be 2x faster in mining for ethereum almost 60 MH/s for $350
https://hothardware.com/news/nvidia-allegedly-readying-pascal-crypto-mining-gpus-ethereum-bitcoin

Hmm, the 1080 variant is stock clocks, I don't see it doing more than 25MH, certainly no more than 30MH/s for Eth.  The 8x rig in the slide listed at the bottom is doing 200 with 8 cards which is 25MH/sec per card. 

My $0.02 says there just isn't going to be a substantial change in hashrate on any of these cards, provided they even exist.  Like the OP I wouldn't be buying them anyway, as I may game with one or resell it at some point. 

I read they won't just retail these to anyone either, that they would be going out in large quantities only.  This also seems...odd. 

I thought about compact size and while there is some value to that, so far my experience with the Zotac "Mini" line has been that even though I can cram more in, I have to seriously reel in the clocks to keep the temps down, the cooler just can't keep up under full load, it starts throttling on a 8x1070 rig I have.

I had to cut the Zotac Mini 1070s I have down to 70% TDP to keep them from throttling at stock clocks.

This is a good talk however I dont think you guys know where this is going right? I mean this is what they are doing now, think about the next generation, probably you will not mine anymore with your gaming gpu, they will find a way to block mining on gaming gpus like Intel did to overclocking and then the only choice you will have is buying the mining cards. I said once and I will say it again, gpu manufactures making proper mining gpus is the worse possible outcome since asics for btc and ltc came. So this is really bad. This is asic 2.0.

My guess for the 1080 based one is they put normal gddr5 on it instead of 5x and that gives it a decent boost, probably not enough for 60MH/s but maybe mid 40s.

@OP I agree that they don't understand what the market wants. I would be willing to buy mining only cards if they had a better price/performance ratio or some other special feature, the $350 1080 one is good if it actually gets 60MH/s  but the rumored $200 for the 1060 based one isn't any savings since it isn't supposed to be faster. Better binned memory for faster overclocks, better warranty, (not the rumored 3 months) cooling/power solution built around 24/7 operation, cram 2-4 gpu die on a single board, AMD has done this before but not Nvidia. Custom BIOS for lower power usage.

Yup I see this, I see them blocking or severely degrading the drivers to deter miners from using gaming GPU's while simultaneously enhancing mining specific drivers.

However, I don't see this in the short term -- they would likely have to create an entirely new development and engineering segment for this and that takes time. They will only do that if they think its profitable for them.

Right now, GPU sales are up and manufacturers are just trying to find a way to make sure they can make miners happy while still sustaining the computer gaming market which historically is what drives GPU development in the first place.

Rumor is the 1080 variant mining GPU will have GDDR5X with a 1080 class GPU.

I don't see 60mh out of any of this but I could see 30-35 if they really engineered something unique...

In the first generation of these kinds of cards though, I don't see engineering coming out of them. I see them trying to repackage the scraps and sell them as "mining cards" -- specifically hardware that wouldn't normally pass their QC process for gaming but "would probably last a few months" in the form of a mining card.

they will not be for a small guy.  they will be in panda miner type pc's maybe 8-10 card units.

I simply don't see them selling to a small guy.

I thought of this as well, we could see a whole generation of "Pandaminer" style GPU based miners as a result of this movement.

With that they could get away with a 3 month warranty since that seems to be the industry lack of standard for miners.

The tiny 3 month warranty would be the dealbreaker for me. Unless they have double the hashrate at same or less power/heat I don't see the appeal for anyone, big or small miner.

If they start producing mining specific GPUs then it means that those will cost much expensive and the price of the 400s 500s series will drop too much as they will give less hash than those new GPUs ?

By this I expect the difficulty to be doubled within a month or two and the etherum price would be increased too much together with other coins that can be mined through GPU.

This is very bad to anyone but the manufacturers

It's very nice to mining with gaming gpus, it's like a hobby, you can resell then later, you can play some games, everyone is playing "fair"
Now the big ones will buy a lot of this crap, increase the difficulty to the moon and will turn like asic for bitcoin

I really hope no one buy this crap

Well as observed by Pandaminer and other most recent "Asics" a 3 month warranty seems to be the norm now. Pandaminers are flying off the shelves.


I see this going either way, could be a win win if done correctly but it could make GPU mining "Mainstream" causing difficulty to skyrocket as if "ETH Asics" were really made.

However I will note, ETH difficulty already skyrocketing as it is...

Of course they don't understand miners, it's clear.

But I highly doubt the want to stop miners using their hardware. A sale is a sale and rarely any GPU dies in the hands of (not braindead) miners nowadays.

"bios customization support"

That will never happen.

And realistically, the success of GPU mining stems from everyone having GPUs. If, in a few years cheap mining-only GPUs push regular GPUs out of the mining market then we'll have the same centralized nonsense as with ASICs.

I hope they give up on their mining specific cards idea.

I agree -- the challenge is that "Gaming" traditionally has drove development of GPU's and their sales.

What's happening right now is the Gaming industry is putting pressure on GPU manufacturers to "fix" this issue with no one being able to buy latest GPU's.

Gaming is a huge market segment that drives a lot of revenue globally, not just the sale of games, but monitors, boards, processors, everything that goes with Gaming.

If "Gamers" can't build new rigs because GPU's are out of stock because of mining, it's going to hamstring the Gaming industry which eventually will degrade that industry and slow the development focus of GPU's for Gaming.

Bios Customization Support could happen if the GPU Mining industry proves to be as profitable or more profitable than the GPU Gaming industry long term. Right now manufacturers and investors don't have enough metrics to say if this is something that will last or not. They may perceive it as a "fad"

Given the above perspective, I don't see them giving up on this idea, too much pressure from other big players in the world.

I think the reason why they are doing this is not to make money selling these "mining only" GPUs but I think its to protect their profits during a mining crash period.

Right now if mining crashed. Market would be flodded with cheap RX 580's. 2 of those would be the equivalent to a GTX 1080. So for maybe 2 quarters of the year, their sales would suffer from retail sales.

But since they started introducing these "mining only" GPUs and in 1 year the bubble bursts. Their retail sales might not suffer as bad, since no gamer will buy these GPUs with no display out. Maybe it'd be good for Crossfire/SLI combined with a retail GPU model.

Can you mine with just CPU?

It's a definite possibility of that plus the manufacturers have publicly stated that they are "dedicated" to the gaming industry and right now, Gamers can't get a "gaming" GPU for the most part that's under $400.

I believe they think they can swing miners with a cheaper mining only GPU and miners will quit buying the $250-$350 video cards for mining. If they understood what drives miners decisions on GPU's, they would have a better plan or definitely be coming to the table with a better GPU than what has been leaked already.

It's a delicate balance and if it breaks, manufacturers will pay a price. Last time GPU hype was in full swing and crashed, the 200 series AMD cards were rebranded to create a 'new' generation of cards, the 300 series. I appreciate the effort on AMD and Nvidia's side, but I really do not think this will do much. With problems like low resale, I only really see bumping production the way to go, which is still risky.

The only reason I think mining specific GPUs will come out is because of the number of businesses adopting the Ethereum blockchain for various uses. I don't see them being optimized for machine learning or other sorts of tasks, because that would cut into the professional market too much, but a blockchain mining optimized card does make sense for enterprise use.

Yes, you can. But that is not recommended, you more are wasting the time mining with CPU rather than getting any (real) profit.

There are some coins that can be mined with CPU but it doesn't worth, some mine XMR some mine some other but at the end GPU mining is way too far.

Indeed, this is pure bullshit.

Maybe some distributors are faking IOs to make us believe this is real, but not a single GPU brand announced nor even hinted to those cards existence.

As a Sapphire PR guy stated it the other day, they don't have anything against miners, but the gpu shortages are hurting their brand.

There is only one solution to this: AMD/Nvidia/TSMC/GF producing more chips.

Also, as stated many times, the only way those cards can be better for miners is if they consume less and cost less than videogamers counterparts.

All I see are "mining cards" which are identical except for I/Os and much overpriced.

This smells like the "mining PSUs" you can find on many websites, fake as fuck bait for uninformed customers.