So how much energy is being 'wasted' on mining? Surprised no real look has been taken at the environmental impact, the unregulation of the markets and how much tge crminal community benefits from the ease of currency movement. Wonder if that's one reason bitcoin took a dip as criminals ditched it in favour of others such as monero.
Ironically there are already well over 100 crypto currencies out there that fix the issue of wasting power, the majority of them just aren't getting the required attention to make it big so far. Essentially there are two different approaches, either replace the mining for the sake of proof of work with something more useful like for example Golem or Cure do, or the proof of stake rather than proof of work approach.
I paid £200 for my GTX 1060 6 Gig card. Even those are at silly prices now. I've seen one chap on a selling group on FaceBook look to sell exactly the same card, which he bought at exactly the same time as me for the same price. He wants £320 for it ! I had thought of selling mine but in my own head thats a short term gain, long term loss. Unless he's got a better card for free or a really good deal he'd struggle to replace it for anything decent or with the same performance as the 1060.
So my 1080 is the EVGA GTX 1080 F.T.W aka Cheesecake Edition, I dropped on mine for £420 - sit down before clicking on this LINK (OCUK price as of 1 minute ago). For those that can't be arsed clicking on the link lol, try £698.99...
It will probably be cheaper to buy OEM systems than building your own soon, that's if it's not already.
It is already. At Christmas my pal in the USA was pricing up a Ryzen system. IIRC it was something like a Ryzen 1600 with 8gb Gskill. We did some looking around and he ended up with a HP Omen with a 1700 and 8gb in. Only it was $300 less. After Dell commissioned MSI to make their computers they became cheaper. To the point where I only paid about a £200 premium for my rig, and the case is selling empty for £450. But yeah, not only was the HP Omen cheaper but it was also very pretty and had some pretty cool sled thing going on with the drives (external). That and the price drop made it not even worth bothering getting the screwdrivers out.
Don't most big OEMs like dell still sell a lot of their consumer wares at a loss [and claw it back on services like extended support].
Between GPU's, RAM and SSD pricing, it's just ludicrous how much it is to build a high end machine right now - it makes bike parts look cheap!
They mention that Scan, Ebuyer and Overclockers have agreed to limit supply... which they have decided to do by jacking up the prices to even higher levels of extortion. The cheapest 6GB 1060 was £279 on Monday at Scan - the entire 1060 range is £379 regardless of model (RRP on the cheapest should be £239, most expensive around £330). Ebuyer is pretty much the same, with one exception at £359. OC is better but the cheapest is still £329. Blatant taking advantage of those of us considering a new GPU. Looks like my 970 will have to suffice for a while yet
Why do you think I built 5 bikes this year? lol usually I would have spent all of that on PC gear. But other than the Titan XP and CPU there was nothing else worth buying. SSDs are too expensive, GPUs are ridiculous and that makes the rest not worth bothering with.
My PC was built from whatever sheap **** i could afford at the time... the same budget wouldn't even get me the RAM on its own now...
Sorry guys, it was me! I only went and bought 8 GTX 1070's and their price jumped from £440 to £550 in a week!! HODL!!!
So I just had a quick look, out of curiosity, on OCUK... Cheapest in stock RX560 - £180 Cheapest in stock RX570 - £399 Cheapest in stock Vega 56 - £899 Literal day light robbery. It's only marginally better on the Nvidia side too, but even then, you'd have to be pretty desperate to want to spend £300 for 3GB 1060 performance.
Pardon me for saying it, but you'd better have some spare cash leftover for a mental health check if your willing to pay those prices.
