Miners: Would you buy a stripped down card?

[SketchMaster]

With the RX 400 series flying off the shelves faster than people can blink I'm wondering if there could be a viable market for "Mining Cards". Stripped down cards with no video ports or required architecture and lower RAM count (doesn't effect hashcount, from what I've read), just number crunchers. Priced lower than a full GFX card while still making a decent profit.

Assuming there is at least a 10% savings, would you buy it over a full gaming card even if you had to wait for it to be in stock?

 

[n0x1ous]

for 10% probably not. It would have to be significantly cheaper to outweigh the lost resale value of having no secondary gaming use/no video ports etc.

 

[thilanliyan]

I'd be hesitant unless it can actually game reasonably well. Reason being that if I need to sell the card, I don't want it to be worthless to anyone but a miner.

 

[SketchMaster]

for 10% probably not. It would have to be significantly cheaper to outweigh the lost resale value of having no secondary gaming use/no video ports etc.

What would be the sweet spot? Let's assume no crazy "because they will pay it" markup from manufacturers?

 

[n0x1ous]

30% or so and I would consider it.

 

[SketchMaster]

I'd be hesitant unless it can actually game reasonably well. Reason being that if I need to sell the card, I don't want it to be worthless to anyone but a miner.

The card would have no video ports, so it would not be a gaming card. I guess you could use it as a sister card for CF/SLI, but the lower VRAM may hurt scaling.

 

[ViRGE]

The bigger question, IMHO, is why would AMD sell cards for less than they were worth? If miners are willing to pay gaming card prices (and then some), what's the benefit to AMD for selling those cards for less? Video ports are a trivial cost, and even RAM isn't all that much since you still need 8 chips of it for the 256bit bus.

 

[poofyhairguy]

No, because that is the path to dedicated mining machines (ie only big boys can play).

 

[Headfoot]

I'd continue to buy the gaming version so I could keep the resale market as open as possible. I don't mine much though anymore.

 

[3DVagabond]

The thread is looking at it backwards. AMD needs to design a card that is better suited for mining and charge a premium for it.

 

[Headfoot]

The thread is looking at it backwards. AMD needs to design a card that is better suited for mining and charge a premium for it.

Very good point.

I remember back in the day Asus made a 3 die Crossfire X on a single card version of the 3850. http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2008/03/28/asus_shows_off_its_hd_3850_x3_trinity/1

I think there is a market for someone to come and take a card and put 4 small Polaris 11 dies on it and duplicate as many of the components as possible, tune the entire package for low power and launch.

Any premium you would pay just becomes a matter of break even point and ROI, which you'd likely hit sooner.

 

[n0x1ous]

The thread is looking at it backwards. AMD needs to design a card that is better suited for mining and charge a premium for it.

Very good point.

I remember back in the day Asus made a 3 die Crossfire X on a single card version of the 3850. http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2008/03/28/asus_shows_off_its_hd_3850_x3_trinity/1

I think there is a market for someone to come and take a card and put 4 small Polaris 11 dies on it and duplicate as many of the components as possible, tune the entire package for low power and launch.

Any premium you would pay just becomes a matter of break even point and ROI, which you'd likely hit sooner.

Yup this would be ideal especially for miners using older motherboards with limited slots. Putting multiple low power dies on a card and sell for premium. This is a great idea.

 

[Yakk]

AMD could just open a Mining Division and recoup R&D cost using they're fastest bleeding technology and reselling mining contracts at today's performance levels.

In short, with the huge engineering and experienced human resources AMD has, if they wanted to, AMD could most probably create a division solely focused on mining performance and be way, WAY ahead of even the best commercial miners by huge margins. However, unfortunately stockholders might not like that kind of risk.

 

[thilanliyan]

Yep, as mentioned by someone else as well, I'd definitely pay a premium for a very efficient mining card assuming it can game as well if required.

 

[MrTeal]

There is no reason to make a GPU like what you're describing. The loss of resale just can't be made up for in the lower price.

Fundamentally, we use GPU's because significant R&D and NRE went into designing the high speed memory interface of the GPU, and there's huge volume costs savings. The actual implementation of using them is completely sub-optimal though. Consumer motherboards just aren't made with mining in mind, and we have to use a bunch of tricks to make it more viable. If you're going to make custom mining products, might as well go whole hog.

Asrock has at least shown a willingness to tailor products to the mining market, so I would envision some AIB maker producing something with an Avoton Atom CPU with one PCI-e lane running to each of 16 P10 dies, each with 4GB GDDR5, designed to be put in a 2U server chassis, and powered with a server PSU. Run a custom distro of Linux designed for mining.

If they could offer it for essentially the same as 16 RX480's, 3 motherboard+CPU+RAM+PSU+riser combos, it would sell like absolute hotcakes to miners just due to the simplicity of deployment and the smaller form factor.

 

[Madpacket]

I just made a post about this in the 470 thread but it's more relevant here.

"They could create a "Crypto" card that focuses primarily on enhanced mining and power efficiency but also works "OK" as a gaming card.

So imagine a $400.00 card that hashes at 40Gh but has the gaming performance of a 470/480 with similar power consumption. That would push all the miners towards those cards and leave the 470/480's for the gamer's. The miners would be happy as they would have faster and more efficient mining cards and could still sell them after ROI for a decent sum if they perform on par with a 480.

How would they do this? I don't know. I'm not an computer engineer but look what they were able to do with the Fury Nano WRT power consumption. This was the ideal mining card (aside from the price) due to performance per watt.

I can't speak for others but for me performance per watt is the most important metric followed by price and then actual performance.

Of course this would all take engineering resources in a somewhat risky field but I think it's pretty safe to assume mining isn't going to go away. Even when Ethereum eventually switches to Casper (Proof of Stake vs. Proof of Work) there will be other coins to mine."

To add to this, I don't really like the idea of straying too far off the path and building highly complex dedicated mining machines. This will just accelerate the concentration of the hashes to places with the cheapest electricity like ASICS in China for BTC.

With cheap GPU's and Moore's law being dead anyone can get into mining and make a few bucks or create a few coins to be used in the future for an untold amount of applications. So I like the idea of a specialized card that focuses on miners but in the event mining becomes unprofitable or close to breakeven the card can be repurposed for gaming.

Charge a 50% premium for the mining features (more hashes, same wattage, better voltage control, remote monitoring, smart error recovery, support a wide variety of algorithms, etc.) but keep it affordable enough for the masses.


Edit: For the OP. No, they shouldn't sell a stripped down version - they should sell a much better mining card that can also game. So I can't vote here.

 

[IntelUser2000]

Just sell a card for $20 less without HSF so we don't have to bother with the bad reference one and use our own.

 

[railven]

Ask me, AMD should be capitalizing on miners as much as they can. Specifically for first batch/runs. Price them suckers high. Grab as much money as you can at the start. Had no issues doing it with Fury/Fury X/Nano. Once the miners get satisfied, and you make bank, drop the price. Sell to your bread and butter - mainstream gamers.

At this point, AMD isn't really going to change their market share landscape in regards to gaming. If they sell a bucket load of cards to miners, that doesn't really help them with gamers. So why pretend to care? NV is soldiering on selling cards at prices AMD can easily get from miners.