Question I'm throwing in the towel

[7beauties]

Dear Friends, I refuse to pay $2K or more for a single graphics card, especially since the original MSRP for Nvidia's RTX 3080 was $700, but I've seen prices for it as high as $2,700K. That's ridiculous.. I'll take up some other hobby/ies in the meantime. I wish you, who are still on this ever-inclining treadmill, that you'll find what you want. Good luck.

 

[aigomorla]

I would probably buy a quiet ASIC.
I wouldn't even mind if it was watercooled with blocks.

I just can't stand hearing those fans scream like that.
It really drives you insane after a while.

 

[Rakehellion]

Your rant is a little late. Prices are coming (heading) down, and retail availability is up.

The rant is just on time. Retail availability isn't happening any time soon.

 

[Aikouka]

It also doesn't help that we're still paying a 25% tariff on video cards from China, which is pretty much everything but Nvidia FEs, AMD reference, and EVGA. Tariffs are normally used to equalize the cost of goods from countries with cheaper prices to help bolster the importing country's own goods (i.e. put a tariff on Chinese lumber to avoid excessively undercutting American lumber). The problem is that the vast majority of graphics cards are made in China, and they aren't undercutting non-Chinese graphics cards. I would assume that the vast majority of the cost of the GPU is in the components that are used to assembly it and not the assembly itself.

If you took 25% off the price that I paid for my 3080, then it would've cost about $900, which isn't far off of a typical, higher-end AIB variant's pricing. Outside of the current pricing conditions, I'd likely place it around $850+ compared to the base $700 price.

Well Larry I would say that the intended audience of GPUs is gamers not miners. The manufacturers have said as much and why we are getting LHR models now.

Nvidia made LHR cards so they could create mining-specific cards that cost more per hash. Nvidia loves to artificially restrict functionality (just like Intel) simply because it creates artificial barriers requiring spending more money on more expensive products to remove them. Another example is NVENC, which is limited to two streams on most cards simply... because. If you want unlimited streams, you have to buy specific Quadro cards, and it's not like the GeForce cards can't handle it. Crafty folks have removed the restrictions from the drivers, and the limited cards were able to handle as many streams as they could fit into memory.

LHR cards are charging you the same amount of money for less functionality. It doesn't even matter if you never want to mine anything. If you ever decide to sell your card, it is inherently worth less money because it isn't as capable as a non-LHR version.

I learned that lesson the hard way... if I kept the crypto that I mined back in 2013 and sold it during the recent market top, I probably could have bought a house with it.

I mined back then too, and I sold when BTC was only $30, because I figured it wasn't really going anywhere... that it was more "funny money" than anything. Of course, the constant volatility with how BTC had gone from $30 to <$10 and back to $30 did not help at all either.

Other than that, I also kick myself for ignoring the BTC thread on this very forum back when it was possible to mine with a CPU. I kept seeing it and passing it off as "just a fad".

I was a little hopeful when I hear about the release of LHR version of the GPUs. But apparently no one is making them because the card makers can make more money by selling the regular cards.

That's definitely not true. If you look a the Newegg Shuffle, the vast majority -- if not all -- of the cards are LHR. To be clear, some of them do a bad job at denoting that they are LHR. For example, I got a 3080 from the Shufffle last week, and I thought nothing of it... until I noticed the "Rev 2.0" in the title. Revisions aren't uncommon on silicon; you'll even see them listed when you go to look for things like motherboard BIOS upgrades. However, for Gigabyte, "Rev 2.0" means LHR for any previously non-LHR card. Other AIBs will outright list "LHR" in the title. The EVGA 3060 Ti that was on the Shuffle today actually has no markers other than its product number, which is the LHR version's number. (If you look at the listing's specification, it does state that it's LHR.)

 

[Furious_Styles]

Nvidia made LHR cards so they could create mining-specific cards that cost more per hash. Nvidia loves to artificially restrict functionality (just like Intel) simply because it creates artificial barriers requiring spending more money on more expensive products to remove them. Another example is NVENC, which is limited to two streams on most cards simply... because. If you want unlimited streams, you have to buy specific Quadro cards, and it's not like the GeForce cards can't handle it. Crafty folks have removed the restrictions from the drivers, and the limited cards were able to handle as many streams as they could fit into memory.

LHR cards are charging you the same amount of money for less functionality. It doesn't even matter if you never want to mine anything. If you ever decide to sell your card, it is inherently worth less money because it isn't as capable as a non-LHR version.

Again I don't care whether they are "inherently worth less" to miners because my point was that gamers are their primary customers and when their main customers are unable to buy the cards that they want they will not be happy.

 

[Mopetar]

Their main customers are probably miners. Maybe some of you are crazy enough to game on a $3000 GPU, but I'll pass. Nvidia is just worried that the inevitable bust that follows the boom and what it might do to their bottom line or release cycle. Nvidea doesn't care about you beyond what you'll spend on a new GeForce card. If miners will spend more then they won't care about you beyond some token lip service.

 

[Arkaign]

Their main customers are probably miners. Maybe some of you are crazy enough to game on a $3000 GPU, but I'll pass. Nvidia is just worried that the inevitable bust that follows the boom and what it might do to their bottom line or release cycle. Nvidea doesn't care about you beyond what you'll spend on a new GeForce card. If miners will spend more then they won't care about you beyond some token lip service.

To some extent there is truth, but it's more complicated than that.

If Nvidia cared only about miners, they could simply cut out the middle ground and set MSRP as

$700 3060
$800 3060 ti
$1000 3070
$1200 3070 ti
$1500 3080
$2000 3080 ti
$2500 3090

Etc.

They would sell all of their cards easily, to the big mining outfits, or at least they definitely would have for a very long time now.

Now they have definitely failed to efficiently block miners from eating the majority of cards, but the AIBs and resellers have been the ones vampiring the crap out of scalpy prices, not Nvidia directly, at least no more than AMD's MSRP, and their cards have been similarly gobbled up almost entirely by miners.

I'd argue the larger annoyance is the limited 7/8nm wafer capacity has been dedicated so fully to pricey SKUs that both AMD and Nvidia have utterly left out the value market. Forget whether or not miners would just buy them all regardless, we have NO $149-$249 GPUs from AMD or Nvidia this gen, nowhere close. I believe a mass small die 4GB entry level gaming GPU from each would have satiated a lot of demand and miners probably wouldn't see a huge reason to buy them, preferring larger vram and more cores.

 

[nosurprises]

Nvidia made LHR cards so they could create mining-specific cards that cost more per hash. Nvidia loves to artificially restrict functionality (just like Intel) simply because it creates artificial barriers requiring spending more money on more expensive products to remove them. Another example is NVENC, which is limited to two streams on most cards simply... because. If you want unlimited streams, you have to buy specific Quadro cards, and it's not like the GeForce cards can't handle it. Crafty folks have removed the restrictions from the drivers, and the limited cards were able to handle as many streams as they could fit into memory.

LHR cards are charging you the same amount of money for less functionality. It doesn't even matter if you never want to mine anything. If you ever decide to sell your card, it is inherently worth less money because it isn't as capable as a non-LHR version.

In this case, nvidia is properly pricing the cards. The LHR cards will be closer to MSRP while the regular cards will be 2xMSRP for the mining functionality.

 

[Aikouka]

In this case, nvidia is properly pricing the cards. The LHR cards will be closer to MSRP while the regular cards will be 2xMSRP for the mining functionality.

My issue is that Nvidia is limiting the performance of their product for a specific task simply to sell a product that isn't limited. It's not like the 3000-series LHR cards don't have the hardware to perform like the non-LHR brethren, they simply don't do it. I don't even want to mine crypto, but I also don't like being told that I'm paying the same for less with no tangible benefit to me. Note that I included the "tangible" because some may say that it will increase inventory for non-miners, but I haven't seen any evidence of that.

 

[aigomorla]

Note that I included the "tangible" because some may say that it will increase inventory for non-miners, but I haven't seen any evidence of that.

Thats because the miners are still betting they can do a bios flash or some kind of software hack to get rid of the LHR.

*shrug*

I really see no end to this, especially with ETH's price today.

Ethereum (ETH) Price, Charts, and News | Coinbase: ethereum merge, eth merge, ethw

December 25, 2022 - The current price of Ethereum is $1,219.47 per (ETH / USD). Ethereum is 75.07% below the all time high of $4,891.70. The current circulating supply is 122,373,866.218 ETH. Discover new cryptocurrencies to add to your portfolio.

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even with 1559... its only going to shift mining somewhere else.
And with companies with quickminers like nicehash / hiveOS its not getting rid of the problem, but moving them to another crypto.
And you need miners for crypto, so until crypto disappears, i don't see a solution in sight, unless again, we have something which can mine better then a GPU and not sound like an entitled 3 year old making a stand at Target.

 

[nosurprises]

My issue is that Nvidia is limiting the performance of their product for a specific task simply to sell a product that isn't limited. It's not like the 3000-series LHR cards don't have the hardware to perform like the non-LHR brethren, they simply don't do it. I don't even want to mine crypto, but I also don't like being told that I'm paying the same for less with no tangible benefit to me. Note that I included the "tangible" because some may say that it will increase inventory for non-miners, but I haven't seen any evidence of that.

So your solution is to do nothing?

Depending on your perspective, I view the LHR version as providing gaming functionality and it's only worth $800 for gaming. With the mining version, you can make money from it, so you get charge more for the mining functionality and it's worth $1600.