GPU Prices

[storm5510]

I have noticed that, in the past few months, GPU prices have soared. A 1080 I was watching back in November was in the upper $500 USD area. I look at the same basic types now, they are double that, and some are beyond.

So, is this a simple case of supply vs. demand, or is there another factor here?

[retina]

Originally Posted by storm5510

So, is this a simple case of supply vs. demand, or is there another factor here?

One word: Cryptocurrency.

[M344587487]

It looked like dipping crypto prices were on the verge of making some think twice about selling at least some of their cards 2nd hand, but it's recovering now. Monero is under attack by botnets CPU mining, which is causing the difficulty to spike horrendously (tl;dr everyone is getting a much smaller slice of the same-sized pie). Botnets don't seem to be mining other CryptoNight coins yet, but they and any other CPU-mineable coin is particularly vulnerable to botnets. All it would take is all of the other cryptonight coins to be mined by botnets, and the profitability edge that AMD cards have over Nvidia goes out of the window (AMD are much better at cryptonight, nvidia is slightly better at most other algorithms). If that happens with all other things equal, while probably not enough for people to sell off their AMD cards, there's potential for demand to ease on new AMD cards.

[storm5510]

Originally Posted by retina

One word: Cryptocurrency.

I had to look this up. If I understood what I read correctly then people are using GPU's to create very long and complex cipher sequences to use for web transactions.

Is this anywhere near an accurate statement?

[M344587487]

Originally Posted by storm5510

I had to look this up. If I understood what I read correctly then people are using GPU's to create very long and complex cipher sequences to use for web transactions.

Is this anywhere near an accurate statement?

tl;dr To make transactions secure while being decentralised, many crypto coins use GPUs crunching computationally expensive operations as a form of proof of work (PoW). It's called mining because newly minted coins and/or transaction fees go to the miners. Last month (and the many months before it) profitability was at a peak, it has dropped off a little now (one Vega or 1080 can generate ~$3-$4 a day, used to average ~$5-6).

[storm5510]

I was looking at NewEgg a few days ago. Some prices have fallen a bit. Of course, that depends on what a person is looking for.

[petrw1]

www.nvidia.com may on rare occasion have some "Founders Edition" GTX 10xx for sale.

Are Founders upper end or lower end?

BTW as I write this it has some Titans Xp at $1,200 in stock

[mackerel]

Originally Posted by petrw1

Are Founders upper end or lower end?

They have the blower style coolers. They're not known to be the quietest or most effective.

[kladner]

They are not the fastest card in the stable, either.

[petrw1]

Originally Posted by kladner

They are not the fastest card in the stable, either.

Somewhere it was posted what makes the most difference for TF or LL thru-put.
Seems to me it was Clock Speed?
Or was it CUDA Cores?

I want to assume all 1080Ti have DDR5 RAM???

For example if I look a a few cards on NewEgg I see

256-Bit    Seems they all are 11G
Core Clock       1480 MHz   OR  1531 MHz
CUDA Cores    Seems they all are  3584
PCI Express 3.0 x16   OR  PCI Express 3.0

[mackerel]

Originally Posted by petrw1

I want to assume all 1080Ti have DDR5 RAM???

Think they all use GDDR5X - note the GDDR number doesn't align with DDR as commonly used in system ram. Not sure how many manufacturers there are for the ram, but for GDDR5 Samsung has some nice ram clocking potential.