Cryptominers Are Selling Too Many Cheap GPUs Via Livestream
Gamers, It’s Our Time: Cryptominers are trying to recover some money by auctioning off mountains of used (but cheap) graphics cards via livestreams, presenting yourself a good opportunity to secure a deal. – provided you are happy to take the risk.
It’s been almost a few weeks since the collapse of most of the more profitable coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum, but as they say, one person’s pain is another’s happiness. pc gamer (opens in new tab) Reports that with the price so high that Ethereum notably knocked, the largest currency still can be mined using consumer desktop GPUs, cryptominers and farms are attempting to sell the hardware used to recover their losses. are trying.
GPU is flooded. Chinese miners and South Asian eCafes are now dismantling their mining rigs and putting up cards up for auction on livestreams. 3060 Ti is going for $300-$350 US… pic.twitter.com/kphmIt7vZw21 June 2022
This is because Ethereum mining still uses proof-of-work verification, although the currency is set to move to proof-of-stake, which would make the currency wildly unprofitable using gaming GPUs, Even if the market recovers. This is the same verification method used by bitcoin these days, which is why miners typically use application-specific integrated circuits built specifically for mining, rather than scramble to snag any of the best gaming graphics cards on the market. (ASIC) focus more on miners.
At its peak, a single bitcoin was worth around $64,400, which means that if you bought $1,000 worth of bitcoin back on November 12, 2021, it would be worth about $326 today. Similarly, the price of Ethereum fell to $1,112 this week from $4,600 in November.
Bad news for crypto, good news for gamers
Chinese miners are dumping the 3080 on Jianyu (Taobao 2 market smartphone app) for a pretty insane price from just 3500 yuan ($523). @CapFrameX @davideneco25320 @kopite7kimi @chunvn888821 June 2022
China’s cheap electricity has made it a haven for mining farms, which is why we’re seeing most of the selloff in the region, with piles of unwanted Ampere RTX30 graphics cards being sold on the Jianyu Marketplace website. Some listings were posted on Twitter for the RTX 3080 graphics card. I_Leak_VN (opens in new tab)This shows that these used GPUs are being advertised for up to 3,500 yuan (around $523 / £420 / AU$760).
The technically identical GPU to the original Founders Edition model has an MSRP of $699 (£649, AU$950), so the savings here aren’t particularly massive, though it’s worth pointing out that when we look at stock improvements. And looking at the falling prices, some units are still priced higher than the MSRP, albeit slightly.
An auction has also been held over livestream to help sell cards with Tom’s hardware reporting (opens in new tab) one on Baidu (opens in new tab) The post which describes the mass of cards being advertised via livestream, some under speculation to be from gaming internet cafes. Within the post, the RTX 3060 Ti was listed and sold for between $300 (about £245 / AU$440) and $350 (about £290 / AU$510), compared to just under the card’s original MSRP of $399 (about £299, AU$540), a huge improvement over the prices we were seeing at the height of the GPU shortage.
Analysis: Wait, So Should You Buy This GPU?
These sell-offs aren’t just happening in China – eBay, Facebook Marketplace and more around the world are seeing an influx of used GPUs, but there are a few things you need to keep in mind before you buy.
The biggest issue for most people will be how this hardware is used, especially if it likely came from a massive farm rather than an avid miner, but mining cards aren’t really as bad as you’d assume. can. This video from LinusTechTips goes into an in-depth look at how the cards are used for mining and the testing within the video shows that months of continuous use in a mining rig actually had a fairly negligible effect on performance.
This is because many miners underclock cards to better preserve longevity and consume less power, so despite running 24/7, these GPUs haven’t been pushed to their full limits.
There are other things to look for though that you may not see in online listings. John Loeffler, our US computing editor, wrote an informative feature on the dangers of buying pre-mining cards, warning that “in many cases, it is [run] In a dusty open warehouse next to dozens of other equally lit graphics cards, they all generate heat and fry themselves and their neighbors’ silicon transistors, plastic PCBs, and soldering. ,
It’s difficult to judge the cosmetic condition of a GPU from a listing image, but only you can weigh in if buying a cheap, used product is ‘worth it’. For those of you intent on snapping up next-generation Nvidia loveless graphics cards such as the GeForce RTX 4090 when they drop later this year, the perils of buying something new at a used GPU MSRP Might be worth it, provided you need to get over you for a few months.
Whatever your stance on pre-mined hardware, this is overall good news for PC gamers. With the crypto market tanking, there is less competition against miners, which will not only result in mountains of used graphics cards coming to market, but will also lead to greater availability of new stock. It was reported that Ethereum miners spent $15 billion on GPUs over the past two years and it is no small rival to compete.
As we get closer to the launch of Nvidia Lovelace and AMD RDNA 3, we can only hope that the market will give gamers the chance to snap up a new GPU after years of fighting scalpers, bots, and miners. will be less. Failing that, we may again find ourselves dependent on prebuilt desktop gaming PCs and gaming laptops.