When do the next generation GPUs drop?

The problem with the cards right now is Quality & Reliability. Manufacturers strive to hit a “Failure in Time” or FIT, and for CPU’s it’s about 1% at 5 years. After 5 years, you get a bathtub curve, and failures begin happening much more frequently.

The thing is, you can’t just test a product to see if it will last 5 years. There are physics involved, but basically, you put it in an oven, crank up the temperature, crank up the voltage, and you run it for 30 days. At the end of the 30 days, you pull them out & see how many failures you get.

The thing is, these models are all built in assumptions - how often is your CPU / GPU really being worked, for example, and for how many hours a day.

Up until Cryptomining, no one would have thought a non-data center GPU was being built for 24x7x365. But with mining, my guess is that you’re going to see a lot of failures a lot sooner than their FIT models would suggest.

It may up warranty claims, but most warranties only go out to 3 years.

You are literally rolling the dice on buying any used crypto cards.

Now nvidia is getting into Machine Learning / Deep Learning in a major way, and these cards are manufactured to run in a data center environment, 24x7. If you think gaming GPU’s are expensive, check these bad boys out.

Oh, I’m not disagreeing with you. Gold is still a fairly rare element, though–I read somewhere that all the known mined gold in existence would fit into a surprisingly small cube (can’t remember the dimensions offhand), which along with the lack of corrosion is why it was prized as a metal used in currency (and why some goofy people still think it’s a good thing to base a nation’s money supply on). But yeah, based solely on its industrial applications or whatever, the price would still drop substantially. Alas, people like the shininess for jewelry and all that stuff.

The price function had always contained the component of scarcity. It is unhelpful to ignore that.

As hinted at above, in the long term, gamers > miners. The problem is, virtually no US companies have the discipline to look beyond this quarter, much less a year or so in advance. Eventually, sooner rather than later, crytpocurrency mining will die. But gaming will go on. Unless this kills it.

I mean, right now, I’m using a 970. My wife is still on a GTX 480. If we wanted or needed to upgrade, we’d have to buy entirely new machines, because it would cost more to buy a single GPU than it would to buy an entire new system. That, in any universe, is fucking insane.

Do you have any links for data in regards to this? I’ve always assumed that with things like PCBs and processors your failure rate was highest in the first few months, and if it survived that it was basically never going to fail unless it was abnormally stressed beyond its intended operating temperature or voltage. Obviously moving parts like fans will need to be replaced in time, and heatsinks need to be cleaned, but does the actual chip failure rate go up appreciably? I’ve only ever had one video card die on me, and that was because of capacitor plague. If I had replaced them I’m sure the card would have continued living without a problem.

My 970 is selling used on eBay at higher prices than what I paid for it new back in 2015. That kind of blows my mind. On the other hand, I have an otherwise worthless seven year old 6950 that I can now offload for $60 or so. I can’t believe even (relatively) ancient hardware like that has value these days for miners.

If nothing else, I’m glad we’ve reached a point where acceptable performance is easy to come by. It’s not like 15-20 years ago where you needed to spend a fortune to play a game at 30 fps at a reasonable resolution. As expensive as video cards are getting because of miners, the overall cost of a good gaming PC is substantially less than what it was back in the day.

So for somebody in the know: Can nVIDIA and AMD design cards specifically for mining that are substantially better than what they’re doing now from a price/performance standpoint, or are gaming cards simply great at mining because mining and gaming benefit from the same kind of processing functions?

No links, but I worked for 5 years inside the Q&R department for Intel, and my team wrote software for the Q&R engineers, so I kind of learned this. I know that all the electronic manufacturing companies do this.

I am now glad I bought a 1050Ti back in December. At that point, miners weren’t interested in them. Now, the same 4GB MSI 1050Ti Gaming X I bought for $150 ($170 - $20 rebate) is sold out on Newegg and is selling from 3rd parties there for $200-$250, same on Ebay. That’s ridiculous for a card that’s really only good for 1080p gaming.

Fuck miners.

Yeah this is bonkers, who could have imagined I’d feel GOOD about buying a launch edition 1080 a year and a half later? What other tech ever appreciates in price?

(Obligatory Note: not all Franklin Mint plates / figurines / civil war or Star Trek chess sets appreciate in value)

Diego

Gamecube Component cables!

Don’t forget the Xbox One Kinect adapters!

Ugh, I do wish I had easier access to these guys

I feel the same way, but I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’ll never own them. It’s not really a big deal anyway; I think the games look good on my CRT even with composite, and on top of that you can always buy an early revision Wii on eBay for a pittance and play your GC games on it with the Wii component cables and have it look about as nice anyway.

If nothing else, Dolphin has gotten to the point where it can emulate most GC games without issue (and make them look far nicer on modern screens than original hardware regardless of cables anyway).

WIll be looking to grab the 1080 equivalent this time instead of the 1070

Assuming the cryptominers don’t drive them immediately up to 250% MSRP, I will be as well!

Might as well wish for Middle East Peace and reversing global warming while we’re at it.

It was hard to find the new high end Nvidia card in stock before the crypto-mining craze. It’s going to be silly this time.

Bitcoin should start a GPU certification process. They can put a little sticker on the box. “100% Compatible with Bitocoin!” Or somesuch.

Damn, 4k means I have to care about this release. Fuck. My advice to everyone else is to invest in lower resolution monitors.

Once you go 4K you can’t ever go back.