Bitcoin Forum

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I wish I could justify buying $900 per card. In this BTC economy, not sure if it'd ever be worth it. I'll stick with my 2 5830's that I snagged for $100.

Good card for gaming not so much for mining. I'm not sure why miners still jump on this card, all its got going for its self is megahash per square foot.

So your say 6990s make you cool

Ya there's a reason walmart does so well, they keep cost low

I guess people without or very low power concerns can use the 5830 method and those with the high power usage would look more towards the 6990s. You can build a complete rig with 4 5830s for 800ish bucks and get more than one 6990 mhash. the downside is your are "wasting" power for other parts (mobo, ram, cpu...). so if you add 4 6990s at 3000 bucks you can build 3 nearly 4 rigs for that. lets say three rigs at 1200 mhash a pop totals 3600 mhash. 4 6990s on avg will pump out 3000 mhash (keep in mind you may need to spend for an additional psu changing the equation a little). So if power is primary concern then the 6990 might be the way to go, but for myself and others power is not a concern 5830s solution is the way to go.

The problem is you have to wait a very long time for the 6990 to make up the price difference between the two cards. Lets use the 5850 for example since that was the last 5xxx series card to have a great deal.

I think its fair to say a 6990 can generate 900 megahash with a healthy overclock. A 5850 can generate 390 with a healthy overclock. That means you need 2.3 5850's to get the same megahash.

A 6990 requires around 330 watts at full load. A 5850 requires around 170. 170*2.3= 391 watts for the same ammount of megahash.

This next part will be different for every one. If I use my 6.7c a kwh it would take much longer to recover the costs and it would be much faster if I used 25c a kwh. I'm going to use 15c a kwh because I remember hearing thats the average in the US.

So the difference is 61 watts which is 22 cents per day, 6.60 dollars per month.

2.3 5850's would cost you 145*2.3=333.50
The difference between a 6990 and 2.3 5850's is 401.49

This means it would take 1,825 days or 5 years to make up the price gap between these cards.

And for future resale value, how much are you going to be able to get (as a hedge against Bitcoins crashing) for that 5850?

I'm betting should Bitcoins crash, and I need to resell my hardware because I can't make $$ from it any more, I'd maybe be able to get $20-40 for that 5850 once all the miners start selling the hardware that isn't making them $$ (think flooding the market with low grade hardware that gamers don't want).

That's a fair a point. I'd also like to point out that a 5850 can make enough to pay it's self off in around 2 months. As long as bitcoins doesn't crash in two months a 6990 is the wrong decision. Two months is a fairly small window and I don't expect bitcoins to be gone in 2 months.

Limit 1. :(

I agree with this. betting on bitcoin to fail is not really what btcs are about.

Well fuck..

I almost bought one and then it told me something about my shipping amount being updated and then there was $48 in taxes and $8 more for shipping and i re considered my purchase.

I spoke with TigerDirect customer service earlier this morning to find out if these cards were actually in stock and was told that they were not and that the manfuacturers eta for receiving their shipment was next week and that they were expecting 30 in stock. I called again here just a little while ago to confirm that response and was simply told their system showed that they were on backorder. So keep in mind that what you guys are buying is a pre-order for cards they may or may not get and that these are not actually in stock. TigerDirect is notorious for taking a bunch of orders for items they can't fulfill.

They were supposed to get 100 July 29th from XFX (according to TD, just got off the phone, checking the status of my order).  That shipment has not come in yet...  TD has about 30 orders for these cards right now.
They offered to cancel the order or change to a "comparable" device.... well, there was no comparable device (i did ask if by some chance they had a 5970 collecting dust over there... LOL ), so I asked them to just let the order stand as is... will check with them on Monday.

On another note,

here's a link that shows more info on inventory:  NOTE! this is not Tiger Direct's inventory AFAIK, don't get confused.

http://www.shopblt.com/cgi-bin/shop/shop.cgi?action=enter&thispage=0110040015014_BGB5888P.shtml&order_id=!ORDERID!

Give the page a efw seconds to load the inventory info in the middle of the page...

158 on order, 99 expected by 8/15

BTW,  I called XFX just now, and they said don't expect any to ship till the end of August.

hmm ya i thought this was too good to be true for instant shipping. funny... it will ship at end of august and their website says "ships within 1-2 days". do they charge card when you order, or do you only get charged after item ships?

I've had an order at Amazon for the XFX 6990 for over a month and still hasn't shipped yet and Newegg hasn't had anything since the last part of June so I wouldn't expect TigerDirect to get ahold of more than a handful of these at best.

6990's can't be mass produced like other cards, same with the GTX 590.

They have to handpick full 6970 cores with the lowest current leakage, lowest operating voltage and the highest tolerance to heat.

It might be weeks or months before they can produce a batch of a few hundred cards, the vast majority go towards cheaper consumer models, dual GPUs are a small niche