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>Reportedly, one big reason used GPU prices are tanking is because crypto miners are flooding the market with cards that are no longer profitable due to the ong

>Reportedly, one big reason used GPU prices are tanking is because crypto miners are flooding the market with cards that are no longer profitable due to the ongoing crypto crash, where the total market cap of all crypto assets has fallen by two-thirds since its peak of $3 trillion last November. (Miners have been switching away from GPUs for some time, though.) What to do with all that computing power now. I guess AI.

plaguepilled 4y ago
Collaborative scientific computing!
alexklarjr 4y ago
>ai sturtups are flooding the market with cards that are no longer profitable due to the ongoing hype fade, now back to VR news…
- myself248 4y ago
  I should buy some Fuzzy Logic domain names in case that particular hype cycle comes back around.
baal80spam 4y ago
I'm not an expert but I wouldn't want to buy a second-hand GPU that was stressed by crypto mining.
- jayd16 4y ago
  I mean, if the price it right, why not? I wouldn't want to pay anywhere near full price, though.
  - pojzon 4y ago
    If the price is like 20% of retail - why not. If higher or close to retail - why buy used gpu ? Let miners literally drawn in debt.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  The damage is actually comparable or lower than normal usage, since they run at a constant temp which is less stressful and tend to be undervolted to get a better hashrate/dollar so the lines shouldn't be eroded much. At least according to that one LinusTechTips test.
  - more_corn 4y ago
    But they’re put together by amateurs, in non-static safe environments, operated with questionable cooling…
    - moffkalast 4y ago
      Sounds like exactly how gamers use them too.
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago
    There are different problems. Thermal cycling common to gaming uses causes mechanical failures in chips, between chips and the board, and the board - but electrolytic capacitor lifetime drops dramatically as temperature goes up. Not much thermal cycling in desktop systems seeing mostly "productivity" use that have proper ventilation.
    - zaptrem 4y ago
      Capacitors have been massively over-specced for PCs for over a decade now. This was only a potential problem ~<2010 for components like GPUs. Maybe still a problem with really cheap power supplies today, but that's not what we're talking about.
    - bsamuels 4y ago
      optimal running temperatures for gpus during mining is way lower than what most games will pull. memory has to stay as cool as possible or else the overclock will be unstable.
      - KennyBlanken 4y ago
- RedShift1 4y ago
  Is there any evidence that chips degrade in such a way? I've got servers that are 8 years old that ran full bore and they still work fine?
  - walrus01 4y ago
    more concerning is the wear/tear on the fan bearings and the thermal interface between heatsink and board will often be dried out and in poor condition. some gpus are rather hard to get a replacement fan for because it's not like they use an off the shelf modular 60 or 80mm 12vdc fan.
    - yardie 4y ago
      The GPU makers aren’t exactly making fans in-house. There is probably a seller on AX with the exact part needed. I’ve had great luck in finding replacement parts for pretty niche hardware.
      - walrus01 4y ago
        if the fans aren't sold by newegg and its top ten largest US domestic competitors as standard sized items - i would consider them as rare weird items, because the size, shape and mounting of the blower is often unique to each card. not going to play games with something I have to order on aliexpress and wait 6 weeks for it to maybe show up from china.
        KennyBlanken 4y ago
        Most of them are 95mm fans. You can get replacement fans on ebay for almost any relatively common GPU because most of these fans come from the same places and the companies that make the fans for the GPU manufacturers long ago figured out there was a market for replacement units. The higher end card companies in some cases will just ship you a replacement fan if your email to them is pleasant. Or sell it to you for a modest price. I just looked and I can get replacement fans for my specific GPU for less than $20 including shipping.
- wyager 4y ago
  Constant-on is typically less harmful to the chips than on-and-off. Electromigration or whatever is less of a risk than solder joints going bad.
- runnerup 4y ago
  Crypto miners actually often run the cards at low wattages and low heat. Because the top 5% of performance requires like 30% of the energy. So you can reduce your marginal cost (electrical bill) by 30% while only decreasing your revenue (mining) by 5%. Gamers are the ones destroying GPU's, not professional miners who tune their systems properly.
  - gaudat 4y ago
    But they stress the hell out of the VRAM coz mining is limited by memory bandwidth. There are reports on 2nd hand video cards from miners getting rendering artifacts after only a few days of gaming.
    - danachow 4y ago
      It’s not like this memory use actually causes wear and tear though - DRAM doesn’t involve some irreversible process like Flash does. At the end of the day it is still the same slow thermal death - mining just means the RAM is more prone to overheating than the GPU. And yes it’s hard to know after the fact how the RAM has been treated - but if the RAM is properly cooled it should have no wear just due to use.
      - dragontamer 4y ago
        All transistors wear out the more you use them. DRAM is pretty durable but the controller, bus pins, and other parts would be the wear/tear in my opinion. Those other bits inside the DRAM could very well wear out.
        7speter 4y ago
        Also the gddr6x that’s used on the higher end ampere cards (3070ti and above) are known to get really hot
        danachow 4y ago
        That transistor wear is going to be on a timescale far longer than at issue here - the silicon aging effects referring to will take place over decades of full time for use at low operating temperature - none of these graphics cards are anywhere near that old.
- derefr 4y ago
  Why not? Embarrassingly-parallel problems (of the kind you'd use a GPU for) are a perfect use-case for enhancing fault-tolerance through redundancy (i.e. running your program on three cards at once and only accepting the output if they all agree.) The only place this doesn't apply is gaming, where you're trying to get realtime interactive results while economizing on both cost and energy. But for every other use of a GPU, you can't go wrong with "throwing more compute at the problem."
- caymanjim 4y ago
  I don't think anyone is suggesting you should buy a used one. The fact that crypto miners are dumping them likely indicates that they aren't going to buy the new ones up. It could mean they're just rotating stock, but given crypto prices, more likely means they're giving up and dumping assets. This should free up new stock for the rest of us. I'd buy a used one if the price were commensurate with the risk. Say 20% retail.
- nixass 4y ago
  >I'm not an expert This
- WithinReason 4y ago
  Lot of info in this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T0npiqjEWQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T0npiqjEWQ Apparently GDDR6X and HBM memory might degrade from Ethereum mining
JonathanFly 4y ago
>What to do with all that computing power now. I guess AI. For AI, the lack of memory is pretty limiting. Having a ton of 8 GB or 10 GB memory GPUs (3070/3080) is annoying and often just not even possible to use effectively without designing specifically to it. If they get really really cheap maybe they'll be some tools or models that are built to leverage scenarios like that, it's not impossible, but for now it's probably just the cheap 3090s (24GB of memory) that will benefit AI.
- dannyw 4y ago
  I picked up a cheap ex-mining 3090 last week. Amazing for a ML hobbyist. Works out so much cheaper over time than paying for cloud GPUs. A couple weeks of training and I break even.
  - teeray 4y ago
    Where did you shop for used ex-mining cards?
    - loeg 4y ago
      ebay
  - stefanwlb 4y ago
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  Feels like distributed model training would be the ultimate yak shaving exercise for training ML models at home. Sure you can do it, the cost of the lower memory cards is super attractive, you'll definitely learn lots of cool things, and, after all the effort you will have made exactly no progress on the original task you set out to do. Kind of like the choice between making a video game or a game engine.
Godel_unicode 4y ago
Halo Infinite is amazing.
karmasimida 4y ago
Big tech would curb their appetite for giant models during down turn as well. Expect price to dive deeper lol
somethoughts 4y ago
Seems like it'd be a decent time to start some version of a indie "cloud gaming as a service" company similar to Nvidia GeForce Now or Google Stadia. It perhaps isn't the end of the world if your gaming session errors out due to the service being based on used crypto mining GPU cards - especially as the service subscription cost approaches $0/month.
- keithalewis 4y ago
  Ooh, ooh. T-cool. Let's call the game Nero's Fiddle.
- fomine3 4y ago
  Nvidia disallows use Geforce on datacenter
  - hyperhopper 4y ago
    Doesn't that violate first sale doctrine?
    - junofan 4y ago
      You can write your own drivers I guess.
Sakos 4y ago
What about gaming? People have been waiting to be able to buy affordable GPUs for a while now.
- Bigpet 4y ago
  The DIY desktop gaming tower market has got to be pretty small by now. Margins on pre-builds have been shrinking to almost nothing, I build my own PCs because I see it as a hobby, but I could hardly recommend it nowadays to someone who's looking for a machine, not a new hobby.
  - Sakos 4y ago
    There are a lot of people looking to upgrade their prebuilts, for example. It's far cheaper than buying a new system. You say it like people didn't buy GPUs before crypto. What do you think happened to all those GPUs AMD and nVidia have made every year for the past decade or so?
mkoubaa 4y ago
Computational physics. We have a lot of atom based engineering to work out this decade.
maxmalysh 4y ago
> What to do with all that computing power now. I guess AI. CEO of Kryptex here. We have an answer: https://www.kryptex.com/en/rent-cloud-gpus https://www.kryptex.com/en/rent-cloud-gpus
pjc50 4y ago
> where the total market cap of all crypto assets has fallen by two-thirds since its peak of $3 trillion last November. This is why it's important to keep battering the crypto advocates any time they promote anything linked to proof-of-waste. Cryptocurrency is the "paperclip maximiser" that will consume scarce energy and hardware manufacturing resources, and turn them into "grey goo" which people have been conned into believing is worth something.

plaguepilled 4y ago

Collaborative scientific computing!

alexklarjr 4y ago

>ai sturtups are flooding the market with cards that are no longer profitable due to the ongoing hype fade, now back to VR news…

myself248 4y ago
I should buy some Fuzzy Logic domain names in case that particular hype cycle comes back around.

baal80spam 4y ago

I'm not an expert but I wouldn't want to buy a second-hand GPU that was stressed by crypto mining.

jayd16 4y ago
I mean, if the price it right, why not? I wouldn't want to pay anywhere near full price, though.
- pojzon 4y ago
  If the price is like 20% of retail - why not. If higher or close to retail - why buy used gpu ? Let miners literally drawn in debt.
moffkalast 4y ago
The damage is actually comparable or lower than normal usage, since they run at a constant temp which is less stressful and tend to be undervolted to get a better hashrate/dollar so the lines shouldn't be eroded much. At least according to that one LinusTechTips test.
- more_corn 4y ago
  But they’re put together by amateurs, in non-static safe environments, operated with questionable cooling…
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    Sounds like exactly how gamers use them too.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  There are different problems. Thermal cycling common to gaming uses causes mechanical failures in chips, between chips and the board, and the board - but electrolytic capacitor lifetime drops dramatically as temperature goes up. Not much thermal cycling in desktop systems seeing mostly "productivity" use that have proper ventilation.
  - zaptrem 4y ago
    Capacitors have been massively over-specced for PCs for over a decade now. This was only a potential problem ~<2010 for components like GPUs. Maybe still a problem with really cheap power supplies today, but that's not what we're talking about.
  - bsamuels 4y ago
    optimal running temperatures for gpus during mining is way lower than what most games will pull. memory has to stay as cool as possible or else the overclock will be unstable.
    - KennyBlanken 4y ago
RedShift1 4y ago
Is there any evidence that chips degrade in such a way? I've got servers that are 8 years old that ran full bore and they still work fine?
- walrus01 4y ago
  more concerning is the wear/tear on the fan bearings and the thermal interface between heatsink and board will often be dried out and in poor condition. some gpus are rather hard to get a replacement fan for because it's not like they use an off the shelf modular 60 or 80mm 12vdc fan.
  - yardie 4y ago
    The GPU makers aren’t exactly making fans in-house. There is probably a seller on AX with the exact part needed. I’ve had great luck in finding replacement parts for pretty niche hardware.
    - walrus01 4y ago
      if the fans aren't sold by newegg and its top ten largest US domestic competitors as standard sized items - i would consider them as rare weird items, because the size, shape and mounting of the blower is often unique to each card. not going to play games with something I have to order on aliexpress and wait 6 weeks for it to maybe show up from china.
      - KennyBlanken 4y ago
        Most of them are 95mm fans. You can get replacement fans on ebay for almost any relatively common GPU because most of these fans come from the same places and the companies that make the fans for the GPU manufacturers long ago figured out there was a market for replacement units. The higher end card companies in some cases will just ship you a replacement fan if your email to them is pleasant. Or sell it to you for a modest price. I just looked and I can get replacement fans for my specific GPU for less than $20 including shipping.
wyager 4y ago
Constant-on is typically less harmful to the chips than on-and-off. Electromigration or whatever is less of a risk than solder joints going bad.
runnerup 4y ago
Crypto miners actually often run the cards at low wattages and low heat. Because the top 5% of performance requires like 30% of the energy. So you can reduce your marginal cost (electrical bill) by 30% while only decreasing your revenue (mining) by 5%. Gamers are the ones destroying GPU's, not professional miners who tune their systems properly.
- gaudat 4y ago
  But they stress the hell out of the VRAM coz mining is limited by memory bandwidth. There are reports on 2nd hand video cards from miners getting rendering artifacts after only a few days of gaming.
  - danachow 4y ago
    It’s not like this memory use actually causes wear and tear though - DRAM doesn’t involve some irreversible process like Flash does. At the end of the day it is still the same slow thermal death - mining just means the RAM is more prone to overheating than the GPU. And yes it’s hard to know after the fact how the RAM has been treated - but if the RAM is properly cooled it should have no wear just due to use.
    - dragontamer 4y ago
      All transistors wear out the more you use them. DRAM is pretty durable but the controller, bus pins, and other parts would be the wear/tear in my opinion. Those other bits inside the DRAM could very well wear out.
      - 7speter 4y ago
        Also the gddr6x that’s used on the higher end ampere cards (3070ti and above) are known to get really hot
      - danachow 4y ago
        That transistor wear is going to be on a timescale far longer than at issue here - the silicon aging effects referring to will take place over decades of full time for use at low operating temperature - none of these graphics cards are anywhere near that old.
derefr 4y ago
Why not? Embarrassingly-parallel problems (of the kind you'd use a GPU for) are a perfect use-case for enhancing fault-tolerance through redundancy (i.e. running your program on three cards at once and only accepting the output if they all agree.) The only place this doesn't apply is gaming, where you're trying to get realtime interactive results while economizing on both cost and energy. But for every other use of a GPU, you can't go wrong with "throwing more compute at the problem."
caymanjim 4y ago
I don't think anyone is suggesting you should buy a used one. The fact that crypto miners are dumping them likely indicates that they aren't going to buy the new ones up. It could mean they're just rotating stock, but given crypto prices, more likely means they're giving up and dumping assets. This should free up new stock for the rest of us. I'd buy a used one if the price were commensurate with the risk. Say 20% retail.
nixass 4y ago
>I'm not an expert This
WithinReason 4y ago
Lot of info in this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T0npiqjEWQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T0npiqjEWQ Apparently GDDR6X and HBM memory might degrade from Ethereum mining

JonathanFly 4y ago

>What to do with all that computing power now. I guess AI. For AI, the lack of memory is pretty limiting. Having a ton of 8 GB or 10 GB memory GPUs (3070/3080) is annoying and often just not even possible to use effectively without designing specifically to it. If they get really really cheap maybe they'll be some tools or models that are built to leverage scenarios like that, it's not impossible, but for now it's probably just the cheap 3090s (24GB of memory) that will benefit AI.

dannyw 4y ago
I picked up a cheap ex-mining 3090 last week. Amazing for a ML hobbyist. Works out so much cheaper over time than paying for cloud GPUs. A couple weeks of training and I break even.
- teeray 4y ago
  Where did you shop for used ex-mining cards?
  - loeg 4y ago
    ebay
- stefanwlb 4y ago
MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
Feels like distributed model training would be the ultimate yak shaving exercise for training ML models at home. Sure you can do it, the cost of the lower memory cards is super attractive, you'll definitely learn lots of cool things, and, after all the effort you will have made exactly no progress on the original task you set out to do. Kind of like the choice between making a video game or a game engine.

Godel_unicode 4y ago

Halo Infinite is amazing.

karmasimida 4y ago

Big tech would curb their appetite for giant models during down turn as well. Expect price to dive deeper lol

somethoughts 4y ago

Seems like it'd be a decent time to start some version of a indie "cloud gaming as a service" company similar to Nvidia GeForce Now or Google Stadia. It perhaps isn't the end of the world if your gaming session errors out due to the service being based on used crypto mining GPU cards - especially as the service subscription cost approaches $0/month.

keithalewis 4y ago
Ooh, ooh. T-cool. Let's call the game Nero's Fiddle.
fomine3 4y ago
Nvidia disallows use Geforce on datacenter
- hyperhopper 4y ago
  Doesn't that violate first sale doctrine?
  - junofan 4y ago
    You can write your own drivers I guess.

Sakos 4y ago

What about gaming? People have been waiting to be able to buy affordable GPUs for a while now.

Bigpet 4y ago
The DIY desktop gaming tower market has got to be pretty small by now. Margins on pre-builds have been shrinking to almost nothing, I build my own PCs because I see it as a hobby, but I could hardly recommend it nowadays to someone who's looking for a machine, not a new hobby.
- Sakos 4y ago
  There are a lot of people looking to upgrade their prebuilts, for example. It's far cheaper than buying a new system. You say it like people didn't buy GPUs before crypto. What do you think happened to all those GPUs AMD and nVidia have made every year for the past decade or so?

mkoubaa 4y ago

Computational physics. We have a lot of atom based engineering to work out this decade.

maxmalysh 4y ago

> What to do with all that computing power now. I guess AI. CEO of Kryptex here. We have an answer: https://www.kryptex.com/en/rent-cloud-gpus https://www.kryptex.com/en/rent-cloud-gpus

pjc50 4y ago

> where the total market cap of all crypto assets has fallen by two-thirds since its peak of $3 trillion last November. This is why it's important to keep battering the crypto advocates any time they promote anything linked to proof-of-waste. Cryptocurrency is the "paperclip maximiser" that will consume scarce energy and hardware manufacturing resources, and turn them into "grey goo" which people have been conned into believing is worth something.