Looking at graphics card prices recently and they seem to be a bit all over the place.. 1060 6Gb variants can be found for only £20 less than a 1070? And the AMD side is really inflated as well.. Is it really worth buying a new GPU now, or should I be waiting for the next generation to come out in the hopes prices stabilise? The rumour mill is seeming to say team green would be releasing by the end of this year. Anyone have an opinion on this?
I'd wait for the next week at least - Bitcoin was banned in China earlier this month (both using it and operating an exchange) which has caused the value to tank hard. It's dropped from £3600 to £2800 since the start of the month which may reduce mining demand i.e. fewer GPU purchases by miners. The 6GB 1060 I've been keeping tabs on has dropped £20 since I looked at it earlier this week so I'd suggest waiting until Bitcoin starts to gain again
Bitcoin is farmed with ASICs though, not with GPUs. It's the other coins like Etherium (there are many others) which are causing the GPU shortage. Those don't seem to be tanking. Something interesting about Etherium, though, is that they need to hold a large graph in VRAM. Once the size of this graph gets large enough (it increases as more coins are mined) it won't fit on the 4GB cards. Hopefully this should allow a lot of 470/480/570 cards to come back onto the market. There might be some second-hand bargains from the miners as well. I'd like to think that the coin bubble will burst, and that it's worth waiting, but I've been expecting this for months and they have stubbornly held firm. I suppose that eventually you can't keep on waiting!
Not sure I'd have too much faith in a card owned by a miner. There may be no basis in my apprehension to it though. I bought a 1080 a few weeks ago now, luckily I had Amazon vouchers and there was a guaranteed price. Prices seem to have got even more silly since.
A good miner will aim for peak efficiency, which means downclocking the chip a bit. I think (hope?) that this means that they won't have stuffed volts up it, so unless the card is shoddily made (in which case you'll have problems with a new one anyway) I would imagine it's fine. Still - it's all hypothetical, as the crash still has not happened. It would all come down to the price they are selling at.
A miner will aim for efficiency, so first they'll drop voltages, then they'll overclock (and overvolt) to see how far their GPUs go, then they'll calculate what's the most cost-efficient (power draw to mega hash ratio) . Then they'll run it at 100%, 100% of the time (except when they turn it off once a month or so to blow out the dust). IMHO, I'd stay away from miners' cards as they've been running at 100% load their whole life in less than ideal conditions. They don't care about airflow or longevity, just ROI.
Depends where you are, I'm not aware of anyone other than EVGA that have a transferable warranty in the UK (unless others have changed?). There was talk of manufacturers reducing the warranty on miner cards but I think that is for mining specific editions but, again, not 100% on that. Be worth looking into before buying though.
As long as the original owner is willing to either send you a copy of the receipt or handle the warranty for you, there is no scare in buying a miner card. They are under warranty regardless of whether they were used at idle or full tilt their entire lives. Warranty is warranty at the end of the day, and it must be able to handle 100% load for the duration of the warranty period. Also, as was stated above, we very often downclock and also undervolt the core as it makes them much more efficient to use. Adidan, those cards were miner specific and didn't even feature display outputs. They didn't sell well from what I can gather due to them being absolutely useless if crypto were to flop.
Aye, I thought that was the case re the mining specific cards. If the seller is willing to help with warranty then yeah, should be dandy I guess. You may have guessed I don't mine
