You said all of those same things in September and October of last year. 2 HD7970s are making $150, or > $100 net of electricity a month. Add in game bundles and BTC still being profitable for at least 1 months+, it makes them a no brainer choice right now.
No, I said that GPU mining was fast coming to unprofitability with halving + ASIC. The difference is that the halving has happened, and ASICs have started to ship. If BTC hadn't doubled in value, we wouldn't even be having this discussion, it would be clear that GPU mining era was basically over. But you can't count on BTC to stay at current values. It can collapse or go up; it's a gamble. (Btw if you are so sure that BTC will keep climbing in price, it's better to buy BTC directly than mine. Same thing last October--if you were sooooo sure that BTC would rise in price you would have been better off buying coins instead of cards. So you lucked out. Don't try to tell me that you foresaw prices doubling since October, because if you were so sure about it you would have bought coins directly.)
In fact, the most you can hope for is that ASICs take a while to ship in bulk but given that even a single Avalon ASIC is the equivalent of several DOZEN 7970s and BFL and others are going to ship soon too, the writing is on the wall. GPU mining really is about to come to a close and no amount of obfuscation on your part is going to change that.
You're encouraging people to buy AMD cards because you can mine on them, saying that yours paid for themselves, while completely and utterly ignoring the above and how you are using numbers from last year. Even your current talk about how a pair nets $100 after electricity is disingenuous because you get much lower rates than most people in N. America and are assuming difficulty stays the same--which it WILL NOT DO. You can't simply pretend ASICs aren't literally on a boat from China right now and as they get powered up over the course of the next month we WILL be seeing their effects on difficulty.
In fact you can see yourself:
http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/ Input 350W (typical because CPU, mobo, drives, RAM, etc. take energy too, not just the card), 0.10 electric rates at $25/BTC and current difficulty (which is about to go up by the way) at 600 MHash/s. You get 2.28 revenue against .84 power costs per day, or about $43 per month. Not exactly earth-shattering... and this assumes difficulty stays as low as it is. When bulk shipments of ASICs hit, you can bet difficulty goes way, way up. There's also no guarantee coins stay at current value; they may collapse at any time or shoot upwards.
So what can you count on if you buy a 7970 today, maybe like $50 at best over the next month or so until the profits simply aren't there? But NVDA cards are more power-efficient so they will save you money over the entire life of the card, which reduces that $50 number down to something significantly less than $50. In other words, bitcoin mining is a minor factor. I will grant you that mining is not literally a nonfactor. But I would not consider it much of a factor. NVDA also gives you smoother framerates and CUDA, PhysX, and better long-term support. That last part is a growing concern because AMD as a company is losing money like crazy and may go bankrupt. It might not liquidate (Ch. 7), but even a Ch. 11 re-org doesn't bode well for long-term driver support and stuff like that.
All of the above is optimistic unless you live in a cheap-power area. People have lights, turn on microwaves, have TVs, phones, radios, garages, refrigerators, and more, so chances are, the typical person adding ~350W of continuous load to their profile will likely be sent up another tier or two in rates. Here in Northern California where I live, tier 3 means something like 30 cents/kWh. Plug that into the calculator and you get a net loss of 22 cents per day every day.
I was talking about mining and specifically mining, you are bringing up game bundles. I said mining is a nonfactor. I said nothing about game bundles.
I've been away from this subforum for a while and was curious why you are now known as an AMD shill/fanboy. I'm not curious anymore.
Facebook
Twitter