Anyone have any leads on obtaining an AMD RX580 or AMD Vega 56 GPU at a reasonable price, and not the “bitcoin will save us all” inflated comedy prices that the cards are being sold at? Ideally near the $199 retail price point the RX580 should be at, not inflated online prices.

I need one to stabalize my home computing setup as I head into another unemployment round for being who I am in a country that is what it is. No intention of touching the blockchain crap with it, it’s use will be to drive a portable eGPU setup needed to keep some income flowing in the weeks ahead, before seeing what bridge is warm to camp under in Jeff’s Seattle.

I’ve got a used NVidia 980 GTX Reference design board from eVGA I can trade/barter with too.

Cheapest RX580 board I see is at newegg for US$410.

Here, maybe...

tanstaafl.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/AMD-Radeon-Sapp...ng/273084676498 (Buy-It-Now or Best-Offer) US$370.

Thanks Doug, missed that one and added it to my watchlist.

It’s odd to watch that eBay/swap market, where it’s gotten cheaper for some folks to buy an entire gaming PC, toss everything except the graphics card, and still making a profit off speculators. All while an entire PC goes to waste so someone can slot one more GPU into an existing PC.

One of the ways I’ve also heard of folks getting their hands on these AMD cards is to buy an entire iMac Pro. Also comes out cheaper then build your own by far these days with how badly cryptocurrency, err, digital benie babies craze is growing. Those folks at least seem to be using the iMac Pros for problem solving computational needs, instead of Ponzi schemes since they also have a nice Xeon in them.

The future’s a weird place, that’s for sure 😂

Wow, I hadn't realized how bad it's gotten in the GPU market lately. I haven't tried to build a gaming PC in a long time, so I've been out of touch with that stuff.

It's a crazy topsy turvy world where these cards are being used as coprocessors for cryptocurrency mining instead of gaming. Wow, a graphics card that literally prints money. No wonder they're being snatched up so quickly. The GPU manufacturers must be thrilled that their cards are being bought up in quantities far exceeding their original intended markets. Sucks to be a PC gamer these days though.

Is your goal to stabilize the system, or to make a good gaming computer? I'm wondering if there are lower-model GPUs you could find which would work well to stabilize the system, but which are no longer valued as mining cards.

I did the research, worked in the industry, am a fanatic about the other part of this setup, and know my current computing setup and needs into 2020. Either one of those cards is an instant slot in and my one of my problems of the past 3 months is solved for the next ~5 years. Please believe what I type

AMD (and probably nVidia) have said that they hate how it is hurting gamers and tried doing things like game bundling to make them less attractive to miners. I can't imagine that they are too awfully upset at selling so many more of the higher margin cards, though.

The mining was affecting prices back when I built my PC. Now it is just ridiculous, though.

Maybe the gpu makers are missing something here. I wonder if they could devise a variant for miners that would create a split in the market.

Easy. Just leave out the video connectors and associated circuitry.

So the variant with the video connections would be priced less expensively?

Why wouldn’t the crypto miners just continue to buy the ‘video’ version if the GPU/$ ratio is to their advantage?

Leaving bits out should make the miner version less expensive.

If the idea was to somehow make the actual video card, for video use, less costly than the version the bitcoin guys want, I do not see how this helps.

The crypto guys are willing and able to pay. There is a limited supply of high power GPU compared to demand. Until that demand is sated or the supply somehow outgrows the demand, I do not see a way for the price of modern GPU for video enthusiasts to decrease.

Some have tried like ASUS, but it’s not really helped at all. https://www.asus.com/Graphics-Cards/MINING-Series-Products/

Problem here is that AMD and NVidia can’t justify the risks in buying more fab space in case this digital beanie baby craze ends, and leaves them with a possibly company damaging loss. So the companies like ASUS and others that make the final video card designs and products are still limited on how many chips they can source to make their products, and adding variants complacates their cost structure at possibly a loss. Everyone’s gambling, but noone’s willing to put in for larger investments in case the party ends soon.

VR hasn’t really taken off to drive new GPU demands, and really AMD or NVidia aren’t at risk here, since consoles and other markets will keep their direct chip businesses going for a while. Instead it’s the much more fragile “PowerCooler” and other very small vendors making consumer PCIe video cards. They lack the power to control manufacturing lines reliabially enough to burst when needed, and are at the tail end of getting other components at times, behind large places like Apple and Samsung for memory, etc...

Companies like Asus have also tried having shops like Fry’s only sell a GPU at retail prices if a customer was also buying enough components to build a PC, and would limit purchases to 1 per household. Didn’t really help either, as folks would still buy and flip the cards right into the miner marker.

Miners then get the cards, run them hot and hard burning them out early, and try to toss them back to those small video card shops for warranty repair. It’s not a wonder they can’t sell at the $199 retail point for an RX580 if a bunch of ponzi schemers are tossing back cards and getting 2-3-4 or so “under warranty”.

Consumer video cards also were never really designed for these compute workloads, instead that was the function of the much higher priced Quatro or other workstation/server class GPUs. Those in recent years have been snapped up by a lot of machine learning/machine vision shops, in the past oil exploration and some other industries were also driving demand. I’ve not seen how many of these cards are going to cryptobenie miners compared to the consumer ones, though my guess is not many. They tend to run a little slower clock for clock to the consumer cards, due to higher precision or ECC style operations, and a slower but more precise driver for some non real time rendering usage.

The rise of CUDA and OpenCL though did really blur a lot of previous hard lines in the GPU market, that’s for sure.

You can't make the gamer card less expensive, that would change nothing in the market. The goal would be to get them off the full cards so the prices are unchanged for gamers - only way would be to make a cheaper card for the miners. Or perhaps more powerful cards that is worth a premium to them.

I love that the myth of a “free market” continues to be a thing. I hope one day folks can see through crony capitalism and late stage capitalism shiny babbles and start getting back to being good for humans again.

Until most participants in that “free market” get around to triple bottom line practices, I personally won’t ever believe in the mythical powers of these so called “free markets”. From my personal experience of my family past and present, all we’ve seen is harm while the rich have fun launching space junk at the asteroid belt.

Oh well. Off to go waste an entire PC and float it on credit for a chance to buy a card at its intended sales price by AMD for my personal needs. Sadly the card Doug helped me find is already way up there in price, and no gaurentee it’s not already fried from participating in a massive Ponzi scheme.

I’ll bump the other eGPU thread when the setup is finished. It’s coming together nicely for both a computing productive workspace, and a self care one for games for me and my partner, no matter who’s laptop is docked.

The mining economy doesn't make all that much sense even to traditional economics. In traditional economics, a trade takes place when both sides value what they get more than what they give. But if, thanks to cryptocurrencies, a GPU can just sit there indefinitely consuming X dollars of electricity and generating more-than-X dollars of cryptocurrency, then what's a fair price for Nvidia to sell them at? Well, there isn't one; whatever retail price you can think of, Nvidia is better off not selling anyone their GPUs, and just trucking them straight from fab to datacentre where they can mine for Nvidia.

It only makes sense for Nvidia (or indeed any supplier of mining rigs or ASICs) to sell them at all, if they don't in fact believe that mining profitability is sustainable. Every sale of a GPU is a short against all cryptocurrencies.

Peter

Oh that last second...

The tiny little pause for timing was brilliant.

??
tanstaafl.

"This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Tim Kretschmer"

Still available here: http://sea.ign.com/corsair-1/132458/video/corsair-stop-gpu-abuse

Saw this on Slashdot today: GPU prices are falling

Oh, thank goodness. At last I can give my huge Games collection the hardware it deserves. In order for DOOM to run properly, should I go with the 8GB card, or do you think I could squeak by with just four?



tanstaafl.

Still not back to retail prices, may take a while still. There's uncertainty still in if GPUs will be good or not for the beanie baby cryptyocoin crowd, as the makers of the Etherium variant claim the rise of ASICs won't help, and GPUs will.

It's funny reading the stories that claim the RX 580 is a "high end" card. AMD never positioned it as such, it was always designed/marketed/sold as a $200 entry level efficient card for quality VR/non 4k gaming needs. The Vega series they had in the labs at the time is their proper high end card and response to Nvidia's lineup of higher end power hungry cards.

In a few years, it'll be interesting to see the research into how the cryptyocoin crap impacted the gaming market. The rise in GPU cost may have chilled the possible VR market, potentially into a spot it won't rise as a gaming mainstream as folks had hoped.