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Technology

Cryptocurrency Miners Are Selling Off GPUs For Cheaper

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Photo: Joby Sessions / PC Gamer Magazine/ Future (Getty Images)

The crypto market is continuing to fall, which has led a ton of miners to exit the market or to downscale their operations, thus finding themselves in possession of valuable computer components that they now no longer need. Some such miners, many from China and South Asia (where electricity is cheaper), are now taking that hardware and dumping it on e-commerce websites. As a result, GPUs that usually go for $500 to $600 are selling for around half that price on the secondhand market.

As noted by PC Gamer, GPUs are suddenly flooding the market, a trend likely driven by several factors. The major one is how cryptocurrency prices have been plummeting since this winter. Now that it seems like the market won’t make a turnaround anytime soon, miners are jumping ship. And these aren’t pristine, out-of-the-box GeForce RTX 3060s that they’re selling. These graphics cards have been used to mine crypto, which uses tons of electricity. Buyers have found that these RTX 3060s were cheap for a reason—many of them are defective after prolonged use. So the common wisdom seems to be that you shouldn’t be too eager to score some used GPUs from an unknown buyer.

However, there’s been some contention in the tech community about how degraded these graphics cards really are. PC World claims that buying a used graphics card from an experienced miner beats buying one from a gamer (who tends to “overclock” their GPUs). Tech YouTuber Linus Sebastian tested some mining GPUs on camera and found that the used graphics cards can still perform well—if they were carefully maintained by their previous owner. So if you must buy a GPU from a miner who wasted a ton of electricity on speculative currency, then you should at least find a reputable seller. Good luck with that, by the way.

If you ask me, I think it’s funnier to let miners languish with a bunch of expensive graphics cards that they can’t even get rid of. It is annoying, though, that Nvidia benefited hugely from the crypto boom, so much so, in fact, that the company got hit by a federal fine for trying to hide how crypto boosted its profits. Hey, at least this crypto nightmare is finally over *knocks on wood* and we’ll all no doubt be seeing far more reasonable graphics card prices very, very soon.

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Technology

Nvidia RTX PC GPUs Come Down In Price As Bitcoin, Dogecoin Fall

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Image: EVGA / Kotaku

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card you’ve been after to complete your “Extreme Gaming PC” build is still in short supply but finally getting slightly cheaper. That’s thanks to a drop in crypto mining participation as the value of Bitcoin and other blockchain currencies plummet ahead of what some analysts are calling a new “crypto winter.” Sounds bad for the server farms cooking the planet for short-term gains, but good for anyone looking to play Starfield on ultra settings later this year.

As CNBC reported yesterday, Bitcoin and Ethereum are both down nearly 50% from their peaks just a few months ago. Whether you think it’s just a cooling-off period, a long-overdue market correction, or a “death cross” omen of bad days ahead for crypto, the shift is already manifesting as modest price movement in the supply-constrained world of PC gaming.

Tom’s Hardware recently did a quick survey of graphics card reseller prices on eBay, and found that the prices of most popular models have started to come down from their peak a month ago. In a few cases, the prices have even dropped by double digits. A 4.5 percent discount on a RTX 3080 Ti might not sound like a lot, but given how expensive the cards are to begin with it comes out to be nearly $100 cheaper than it was just a month ago. RTX 3080 10GB cards apparently saw an even more impressive drop, dropping from $1,804 down to $1,595.

While Nvidia GPU supplies are supposed to improve in the second half of 2022, Intel said last fall that overall shortages, and thus inflated prices, could continue well into 2023. Outsized demand, meanwhile, has been driven in part by recent booms in the crypto mining market. At the same time GPUs became scarcer during the pandemic, Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and other assets reached unprecedented new heights, leading to windfalls for those with the computing capacity to service the blockchain.

But at least on the crypto -side, the tide finally seems to be turning in favor of cheaper graphics cards. Things started moving in that direction last month after Fed Chair Jerome Powell teased interest rate hikes. In addition to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, meme stocks like GameStop and AMC are also crumbling. Hopefully, more affordable PC gaming doesn’t end up coming at the cost of another economic recession.

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Technology

Rare Gundam Graphics Cards Wasted On Crypto Mining

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I can’t explain it. I can’t justify it. But I do get Gundam fans’ strange attachment to the special-edition GeForce RTX 3080 Gundam graphics cards. They’re beefy but elegant and come in a sleek titanium white. They’re also next to impossible to find, which is why some people might be crestfallen to see them put to work anonymously mining crypto currency.

As first reported by VideoCardz, the expensive GPUs were recently spotted at the Nguyenconpc PC shop in Vietnam being packed in cases like sardines, presumably to be resold as custom crypto mining rigs. Announced last year, Asus’ RTX 3080 Gundam cards are pure fan service, with extremely limited quantities pushing them to resale for $2,000-$3,000 on places like eBay. (The most basic RTX 3080 models have an MSRP of $699, though of course you won’t find them for that little these days.)

The Gundam-edition 3080s don’t have special souped-up specs, but these cards are especially attractive to miners since they were created before Nvidia started artificially limited cards’ mining performance. That’s a bummer for the Gundam fans who would love to get their hands on these great-looking GPUs but now probably won’t get the chance.

While pandemic-related supply chain issues and the crypto boom have put a lot of pressure on the graphics card market over the last year, both of those factors are slowly subsiding. Nvidia, for example, has made moves to silo its crypto mining customers from general PC gaming enthusiasts and reduce the effectiveness of mining with its newest cards. Meanwhile, certain crypto currencies, Ethereum ostensibly being one, are set to move to a much less power-intensive mining system later this year.

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While those changes are good for the environment and for people trying to build or upgrade their gaming PCs, it’s probably too late for this current, limited round of Gundam 3080 GPUs. Of course, it’s not like there’s a shortage of white paint and Gundam decals in the world, so hopefully Asus gets the message and decides to bring back the Gundam RTX line in a much more plentiful fashion at some future date.

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Technology

Genshin Impact Devs Awarded PS5s, Graphics Cards Via RNG

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Raffles and gift give-aways aren’t uncommon at company parties, but the company behind Genshin Impact went a step further, randomly awarding hard-to-get graphics cards and PS5s to employees as thanks for helping make one of last year’s hottest new free-to-play gacha games.

“MiHoYo, the developers of Genshin Impact, held their annual employee meeting where they gave away a bunch of electronics to employees in a lottery,” Niko Partners senior data analyst, Daniel Ahmad, wrote on Twitter yesterday. Accompanying photos showed giant stacks of iPhones, Nintendo Switches, GeForce RTX graphics cards, and PlayStation 5s, the latter of which has been especially hard for people to get their hands on following ongoing inventory shortages.

The irony, of course, as PC Gamer pointed out, is that Genshin Impact is itself largely based around lotteries—based on random number generators (RNG)—in which players pay currency earned in-game or real money for a chance to unlock rare new characters. Some are much harder to get than others, leading players to grind and burn through resources waiting for top-tier characters like Venti to drop. Some players have spent loads of money on the game this way, one of the reasons Genshin Impact went on to make nearly $400 million in its first couple of months, according to mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower.

To celebrate the game’s lucrative launch, MiHoYo reportedly used a similar drop-rate system to allocate the limited supply of gaming hardware it planned to give away to employees on top of other bonuses. According to a screenshot shared by Ahmad, staff had a 30% shot at a Nintendo Switch, a 21% shot at an RTX 3070 graphics card, a 16% shot at a PS5, and a 1% chance of getting a combined Apple Watch Series 6 and iPhone 12 Pro Max bundle.

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For the time being, it looks like you’ve got at least as good a chance of scoring a PS5 from getting a job working on Genshin Impact as you do from refreshing your Amazon cart.



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