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The problem is that the mining bubble is temporary, and when it crashes, these miners dump their cards in the used market with _very_ attractive pricing. In 20
by M277 6y ago
The problem is that the mining bubble is temporary, and when it crashes, these miners dump their cards in the used market with _very_ attractive pricing.
In 2018, something similar happened; ETH mining became unprofitable and the result was that used Pascal cards were available for the cheap in the second hand market. The problem for NVIDIA? Turing, the successor to Pascal, released in September 2018.... and many people, instead of buying that, just bought used Pascal cards.
IIRC, NVIDIA even commented that high end sales were low compared to previous generations in an quarterly report.
Granted, the second hand market cannot be solely blamed for this, as Turing was really unattractively priced. (They shifted each tier up, so the $370 GTX 1070 was replaced with a $500 RTX 2070)
These mining cards cannot be used for gaming (this is not the first time NVIDIA releases dedicated mining cards. 2017 had P106 mining cards as well, and when people tried using them for gaming on the cheap++, NVIDIA blocked it through a driver update) and thus reduce the risk for NVIDIA in the future.
++there was some software that allowed you to render on a GPU, and output video from another GPU like the dedicated iGPU of Intel CPUs. Looking Glass, I think? But I don't fully remember. These days, this functionality is actually integrated into Windows 10.