5 ms·

GPUs are used for eth. There is clearly a broad downturn in the mining sector.

by sumy23 4y ago

RL_Quine 4y ago
Ethereum is mostly mined using custom hardware, it's not graphics cards really, certainly nothing you could re-sell to anybody who expects to play Bioshock or whatever. Very small operations are people buying and using actual consumer GPUs, but they tend to be absolutely destroyed by the process and then sold to unwitting buyers. I've sorted through literal milk crates of GPUs before to find a single one which could reliably display a video output after they had been used in a mining operation.
- latchkey 4y ago
  > Ethereum is mostly mined using custom hardware Very large ETH miner here, we use GPUs. Mostly 4-5 year old tech too. Unlike BTC, ETH does not require the latest hardware because the algo, ethash, is memory bound. This is a great explainer [1]. You may be implying that the majority of the network is custom ASICs. I doubt it is more than about 30%, if that. Come august, all the ones with 5gb of ram will also disappear off the network because of DAG growth. GPUs are also not destroyed by using them. I've got GPUs sitting in the worst possible conditions, running just fine for many years now. We have started to change the thermal paste on the hot ones though... it dries out. I don't know what you were dealing with, but that sounds like something else caused the failures as the chips themselves don't wear out like that. [1] https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memory-hardness-explained https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memor...
  - RL_Quine 4y ago
    It does absolutely destroy the hardware through, even very early mining farms had the sole issue of the fans in the cards burning through their bearings. A local electronics recycler had an entire crate of burned out ATX PSUs from some local mining operation, every single one of them had the fan melted off the hub. It's worth being aware that all silicon chips are temporary anyway, they all die to electron migration eventually.
    - latchkey 4y ago
      I don't have fans on my cards. PSUs are generally shit (hand soldered) and that's not what we are talking about here.
      - dropnerd 4y ago
        do most miners choose to run cards without fans because of known issues?
        latchkey 4y ago
        The smart ones do. Fans are moving parts and require electricity. We also put 12 cards in a case instead of the usual 8 or 9. This means fewer other parts too... psus, mobos, ram, ssd, case fans... all of which use power.
- razemio 4y ago
  That is not true. I have 2 1060s and 2 580RX running 24/7 since 2 years. I recently used one to compensate for my broken gaming GPU. Everything works no issues so far. Guess it always depends but it is not like 2 years of mining will render a GPU useless.
  - RL_Quine 4y ago
    You're within the "small miners" part of my comment.
    - razemio 4y ago
      You wrote they get "absolutely destroyed by the process". I do not understand, why you wrote this. It is not true. The stress on the gpu might even be higher while gaming, depending how the gpu is tuned.
      - latchkey 4y ago
        I agree with you, he's totally wrong. In fact, smart miners overclock/undervolt their gpus... so they are running faster, but with less power. Power is what creates heat and heat is what hurts things. Except it really doesn't. Fans certainly die out though... we go through a lot of those on our cases. PSUs are also generally failure prone since they tend to be hand soldered on the insides.
- viraptor 4y ago
  > using actual consumer GPUs, but they tend to be absolutely destroyed by the process and then sold to unwitting buyers This is such an urban legend. There's been quite a few tech people testing this and there's countless articles on the topic. In short - I have not seen a single one which actually found real significant issues with the hardware, even if some are listed in theory. If this was common at least one of them would buy a severely degraded batch, or we'd see some proven report about this.

GPUs are used for eth. There is clearly a broad downturn in the mining sector.

by sumy23 4y ago

GPUs are used for eth. There is clearly a broad downturn in the mining sector.

Ethereum is mostly mined using custom hardware, it's not graphics cards really, certainly nothing you could re-sell to anybody who expects to play Bioshock or whatever. Very small operations are people buying and using actual consumer GPUs, but they tend to be absolutely destroyed by the process and then sold to unwitting buyers. I've sorted through literal milk crates of GPUs before to find a single one which could reliably display a video output after they had been used in a mining operation.

latchkey 4y ago
> Ethereum is mostly mined using custom hardware Very large ETH miner here, we use GPUs. Mostly 4-5 year old tech too. Unlike BTC, ETH does not require the latest hardware because the algo, ethash, is memory bound. This is a great explainer [1]. You may be implying that the majority of the network is custom ASICs. I doubt it is more than about 30%, if that. Come august, all the ones with 5gb of ram will also disappear off the network because of DAG growth. GPUs are also not destroyed by using them. I've got GPUs sitting in the worst possible conditions, running just fine for many years now. We have started to change the thermal paste on the hot ones though... it dries out. I don't know what you were dealing with, but that sounds like something else caused the failures as the chips themselves don't wear out like that. [1] https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memory-hardness-explained https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memor...
- RL_Quine 4y ago
  It does absolutely destroy the hardware through, even very early mining farms had the sole issue of the fans in the cards burning through their bearings. A local electronics recycler had an entire crate of burned out ATX PSUs from some local mining operation, every single one of them had the fan melted off the hub. It's worth being aware that all silicon chips are temporary anyway, they all die to electron migration eventually.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    I don't have fans on my cards. PSUs are generally shit (hand soldered) and that's not what we are talking about here.
    - dropnerd 4y ago
      do most miners choose to run cards without fans because of known issues?
      - latchkey 4y ago
        The smart ones do. Fans are moving parts and require electricity. We also put 12 cards in a case instead of the usual 8 or 9. This means fewer other parts too... psus, mobos, ram, ssd, case fans... all of which use power.
razemio 4y ago
That is not true. I have 2 1060s and 2 580RX running 24/7 since 2 years. I recently used one to compensate for my broken gaming GPU. Everything works no issues so far. Guess it always depends but it is not like 2 years of mining will render a GPU useless.
- RL_Quine 4y ago
  You're within the "small miners" part of my comment.
  - razemio 4y ago
    You wrote they get "absolutely destroyed by the process". I do not understand, why you wrote this. It is not true. The stress on the gpu might even be higher while gaming, depending how the gpu is tuned.
    - latchkey 4y ago
      I agree with you, he's totally wrong. In fact, smart miners overclock/undervolt their gpus... so they are running faster, but with less power. Power is what creates heat and heat is what hurts things. Except it really doesn't. Fans certainly die out though... we go through a lot of those on our cases. PSUs are also generally failure prone since they tend to be hand soldered on the insides.
viraptor 4y ago
> using actual consumer GPUs, but they tend to be absolutely destroyed by the process and then sold to unwitting buyers This is such an urban legend. There's been quite a few tech people testing this and there's countless articles on the topic. In short - I have not seen a single one which actually found real significant issues with the hardware, even if some are listed in theory. If this was common at least one of them would buy a severely degraded batch, or we'd see some proven report about this.