Will you be Buying an RTX 3080?

[Turk]

I think it's okay to talk about 3070 here. It's basically the same series and just as hard to get.
BTW, if you're upset about getting a 3080 when the 3080 Ti is coming soon, don't be. It's highly possible the 3080 will be worth nearly double what the 3080 Ti is since it can mine Ethereum.
Nvidia is going to start mixing non-crypto capable 3080's with regular 3080's, this is going to mean much cheaper 3080's for gamers.

In theory, if they can make the cards.

 

[Bjarne Hansen]

In theory, if they can make the cards.

And they don't 'leak' the fix to get mining capabilities back inside a couple of hours

 

[TedBrosby-]

And they don't 'leak' the fix to get mining capabilities back inside a couple of hours

It was still successful, the mining nerf. Do you mine? I think only people who have direct experience with it should speak about it.

I don't mine anymore but I used to be involved in the scene (had a 6x 580 rig back in 2017).
The 3060 is a big pain to mine with, even with the "leak". First, you have to use an HDMI dongle to fool it into thinking it's connected to a display. Second, if for any reason the OS sleeps, it will nerf the hash rate back to 22/23 MH/s which is pathetically low, as low as a 580/480. Third, you cannot use Mining dedicated OS's, it has to be Windows. Last, it can't be connected to a PCI-E splitter, it has to be connected to at least an 8x port. Also, and please don't skip over this: the beta driver only unlocks the hash rate for a single 3060. You think a dedicated miner who runs 8x 3080/3060 Ti rigs on 1600W PSU's is going to go through that much trouble for a GPU that has to be on an 8x port (eating up half the ports they use in a splitter or eating up a single PCIE slot) just to get a hash rate that's not even as good as a single 3060 Ti? Come on man, don't be ridiculous.
If you don't know anything about this stuff it's fine, but a lot of misinformation is out there.

That's why 3060 pre-builts have basically no mark-up and are much easier to get than 3070/3060 Ti, etc.

Also, there's literally people offering to trade a 6700XT for a 5700XT just because of the worse mining performance, so yes, nerfing the hash rate absolutely has an impact. And right now, a 3080 without hash limit can be used in an 8x mining rig, no HDMI dongles, no special beta driver, doesn't have to be the only GPU, and puts down 95-100 MH/s. If a 3080 Ti requires an HDMI dongle and can't be used in more than 2x per rig, absolutely miners will trip over themselves offering it for a trade for a normal 3080.

 

[BillyBobSenna]

It was still successful, the mining nerf. Do you mine? I think only people who have direct experience with it should speak about it.

I don't mine anymore but I used to be involved in the scene (had a 6x 580 rig back in 2017).
The 3060 is a big pain to mine with, even with the "leak". First, you have to use an HDMI dongle to fool it into thinking it's connected to a display. Second, if for any reason the OS sleeps, it will nerf the hash rate back to 22/23 MH/s which is pathetically low, as low as a 580/480. Third, you cannot use Mining dedicated OS's, it has to be Windows. Last, it can't be connected to a PCI-E splitter, it has to be connected to at least an 8x port. Also, and please don't skip over this: the beta driver only unlocks the hash rate for a single 3060. You think a dedicated miner who runs 8x 3080/3060 Ti rigs on 1600W PSU's is going to go through that much trouble for a GPU that has to be on an 8x port (eating up half the ports they use in a splitter or eating up a single PCIE slot) just to get a hash rate that's not even as good as a single 3060 Ti? Come on man, don't be ridiculous.
If you don't know anything about this stuff it's fine, but a lot of misinformation is out there.

That's why 3060 pre-builts have basically no mark-up and are much easier to get than 3070/3060 Ti, etc.

Also, there's literally people offering to trade a 6700XT for a 5700XT just because of the worse mining performance, so yes, nerfing the hash rate absolutely has an impact. And right now, a 3080 without hash limit can be used in an 8x mining rig, no HDMI dongles, no special beta driver, doesn't have to be the only GPU, and puts down 95-100 MH/s. If a 3080 Ti requires an HDMI dongle and can't be used in more than 2x per rig, absolutely miners will trip over themselves offering it for a trade for a normal 3080.

Why did you stop? I am completely ignorant of the scene however I would think if the return is high I would think a lot of people would be doing it.

 

[TedBrosby-]

Why did you stop? I am completely ignorant of the scene however I would think if the return is high I would think a lot of people would be doing it.

I'll be perfectly honest with you, most of the reasons are superficial:
I live in Japan so I don't have a garage or a basement, so whatever I do tech related is inside my office. Mining rigs are loud. The fans are blowing at 80-90% so the noise is very ear piercing.
I got married and have a baby now, so noise like that is just not good for a comfortable environment to live in.

The next reason is because I'm an environmental engineer in my degree/education. I felt like I was contributing to greenhouse gas for something that I didn't even believe in. I just don't believe that decentralized cryptocurrency is some solution to the banking market. I have my reasons and I have read the documentation on it, my opinion is that centralized currency has existed for hundreds of years. There's ways to combat currency manipulation through legislation and voting, or even just non participation. If you look at Japan and the "lost generation", you'll see that currency manipulation back-fired on Japan badly in the early 1990's and resulted in a deflation of the Japanese yen. As a result, Japanese people in general are very weary of trusting investments/stock markets or banks and a lot of people keep cash in tupperware. They didn't need a blockchain to solve that problem lol.

That said, right now we're at the peak of the bull market. This wouldn't be a good time to invest into a mining rig unless you're willing to wait a long long time for it to return ROI. A 3080, if you're lucky, you can have for $1000. Right now they have a profitability of about $280-$300 a month, each. The difficulty rises every day from new GPU's hitting the work distribution. Ethereum could hit a bull stride similar to BTC, but no one knows, it's all speculation. What we do know is that POS is coming, and when it does, no more mining ethereum on a 3080 for money. People say everyone will switch to another coin when that happens, but which coin? And will it be profitable? How long will it take to figure out which coin "won"? And why even mine it, why not just buy it cash?

 

[Terry Rock]

Oh look!.....another card you won't be able to get your hands on anytime soon.

 

[BillyBobSenna]

I'll be perfectly honest with you, most of the reasons are superficial:
I live in Japan so I don't have a garage or a basement, so whatever I do tech related is inside my office. Mining rigs are loud. The fans are blowing at 80-90% so the noise is very ear piercing.
I got married and have a baby now, so noise like that is just not good for a comfortable environment to live in.

The next reason is because I'm an environmental engineer in my degree/education. I felt like I was contributing to greenhouse gas for something that I didn't even believe in. I just don't believe that decentralized cryptocurrency is some solution to the banking market. I have my reasons and I have read the documentation on it, my opinion is that centralized currency has existed for hundreds of years. There's ways to combat currency manipulation through legislation and voting, or even just non participation. If you look at Japan and the "lost generation", you'll see that currency manipulation back-fired on Japan badly in the early 1990's and resulted in a deflation of the Japanese yen. As a result, Japanese people in general are very weary of trusting investments/stock markets or banks and a lot of people keep cash in tupperware. They didn't need a blockchain to solve that problem lol.

That said, right now we're at the peak of the bull market. This wouldn't be a good time to invest into a mining rig unless you're willing to wait a long long time for it to return ROI. A 3080, if you're lucky, you can have for $1000. Right now they have a profitability of about $280-$300 a month, each. The difficulty rises every day from new GPU's hitting the work distribution. Ethereum could hit a bull stride similar to BTC, but no one knows, it's all speculation. What we do know is that POS is coming, and when it does, no more mining ethereum on a 3080 for money. People say everyone will switch to another coin when that happens, but which coin? And will it be profitable? How long will it take to figure out which coin "won"? And why even mine it, why not just buy it cash?

Thank you for the very interesting read. I have a better understanding of the mining scene. Seems very volatile and risky. Maybe video card vendors need to make cards specifically for mining so it doesn't interfere with the non-mining community.

 

[Turk]

Thank you for the very interesting read. I have a better understanding of the mining scene. Seems very volatile and risky. Maybe video card vendors need to make cards specifically for mining so it doesn't interfere with the non-mining community.

I think they've started doing that now. But I think the problem is they still need to pull the chips from somewhere. I think they're using some of their older non consumer chips. I can't remember the story off the top of my head now, but they are making mining GPU and they are better than using a gaming GPU because it strips out a lot of unnecessary stuff like HDMI ports.

 

[Fennario]

While miners have certainly been a factor in GPU availibilty, the ongoing shortage has more to do with massively underestimating demand, limited foundry capacity, and COVID supply chain issues with sub-components. Chips are in short supply across multiple industries and the problem is expected to continue into 2022 (at least).

Other problem is that the manufacturers are getting fat on profits and will expect to maintain similar margins going forward.

As for crypto, I consider it to be an IPO for the dark web, hitmen, drug dealers, rouge nations, tax cheats, terrorists, and malware (all early bitcoin adopters). At least Chia seems to be designed so that the cost of purchasing storage outweighs the value of the coin (hopefully limited to excess space vs. commercial farms). That said, HDD's are flying off the shelves.

 

[TedBrosby-]

So word on the grapevine, be patient and if you want a 3080 for MSRP, you'll be able to buy one.

Here's my "retired crypto miner/current engineer" projection:
The second highest value cryptocurrency that can be mined by GPU's that doesn't have an ASIC crushing GPU profitability is Ethereum Classic with a valuation of $45 per. Yeesh. Very hard to be profitable there on $1500 GPU's.

Monero is rising in popularity, but pointless to mine on a GPU.

There's ZCash which also gets more and more redundant on GPU every day. A lot of people say "They said the same thing about GPU mining being dead when ASIC's came out for BTC", but this is different. GPU mining didn't die in 2013 or 2018, it just wasn't very profitable. This will literally be the most profitable GPU mining crypto going POS and being no longer profitable on POW. There's currently no crypto that hasn't been cracked by an ASIC that's profitable after it.
Even if something will eventually replace Ethereum, it will take a long time for it to reach network maturity to a point where mining will be profitable. I expect GPU's to start being sold off later in the summer/early fall. POS won't go live until end of 2021 by earliest estimates, but I'm guessing mass miners will want to get back their GPU investment before that since the profit of a GPU/month will be less than getting money back for GPU before the merge is official.

Anyway this is all speculation, but my suggestion is, don't pay more than $850 for an RTX 3080 unless you really need it before Fall. I'm even considering selling my 3080 for what I paid just to get rid of it and buy one again later in the year (I'm taking 3 months off from my computer to visit family in the US so I won't be on a PC much for that time window).

 

[Fennario]

I think that GPU mining has become too profitable for it to ever go away - a new coin will take its place to maintain the demand. That said, the profit makers I am referring to are not miners and traders but hardware manufacturers. From GPU's to drives and PSU's, they have had the best year ever and want to keep the gravy train flowing.

 

[Timo One]

And the world is trying to be greener but mining is not banned. How much electricity does it consume and it is only getting more popular. Storage mining next, best buy your storage before the price of that goes up.

 

[Sascha Reynders]

So word on the grapevine, be patient and if you want a 3080 for MSRP, you'll be able to buy one.

Maybe, but in the meantime things are getting more and more out of hand each passing day. A major online Nvidia retailer in the Netherlands received a bunch of 3080's (amongst other cards) yesterday and prices range from 2099€ to 2299€...I mean, that's pretty f'ing far from MSRP.
At the same time they put a statement on their site that they will be limiting orders to one card per customer to discourage scalpers and miners, because they prefer selling to real gamers. That's very noble of them but apparently they -and Nvidia and any other current retailer for that matter- seem to think every gamer is born with a golden spoon in their mouth

 

[R8pilot]

Many vendors have now given in and are doing the scalping for the scalpers, charging the outrageous prices directly.

Example: I saw that MicroCenter briefly had an RX 6800 XT for sale, in stock (wow). This is purportedly a $650 card (though a third-party version), and they were selling it for $2500. Staggering, but "why not?", as things are so desperate that they didn't have a single other graphics card of note in hand, just a few weird no-name cards in ~$100 range.

 

[Fennario]

Also have an issue with the mandatory bundling of GPUs with unsellable inventory (garbage PSUs, monitors, old motherboards, etc.); and even more so, diverting supply to pre-builts in lieu of fulfilling pre-orders which have already been paid for.

 

[TedBrosby-]

Also have an issue with the mandatory bundling of GPUs with unsellable inventory (garbage PSUs, monitors, old motherboards, etc.); and even more so, diverting supply to pre-builts in lieu of fulfilling pre-orders which have already been paid for.

Keep in mind,
Regarding pre-builts: GPU manufacturers have to honor allocation commitments with their partners before direct sales. And prebuilt makers are long term, dependable customers for a lot of GPU companies. Also, prebuilt companies are doing the least mark-up on 3080's compared to other companies. You can still build a 3080 Gaming PC with Redux for $2100 and can get one from CyberpowerPC for $2000.

 

[Fennario]

My comment regarding diversion of supply into pre-builts was directed towards retailers such as Canada Computers. They pre-sold 3080's to customers but any cards coming into the store are diverted to their pre-built division and the customers are not getting their cards whereas someone can walk in off the street and buy one of their pre-builts (more profit for them)

 

[Timo One]

Yes but a lot of people are still buying them at 5x price so what do you expect. Stop buying them

 

[TedBrosby-]

Just like I said, crypto is going through a drop.
I'm not sure if this is "the" drop or not, it could be. If it is, I expect people to start dumping their GPU's in a few weeks. Maybe sooner, depends if Musk gets bored of trashing it or not.

People think "GPU mining is here to stay", but I think that's a premature statement. If even 10% of the hashing power on Ethereum right now moves to any alt coin, the difficulty will spike and it won't be profitable anymore.

There is no alternative to ethereum that has the volume/value to stay profitable when Ethereum is no longer mined. This means GPU's will be sold off.

Glad I sold my 3080 to a miner last week lol.

 

[brc19]

I gave up on getting a 3000 series card at current prices. Swapped my RTX 2070 to new gaming PC build (B550, 5600x). Hopefully prices will decline over the next six months or so.