Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, morphine, SecretSquirrel
gargar wrote:I've had enough. Bought Xbox One X last week. This maddness is going on for too long. And RAM isn't cheap as well.
What a bad time for PC gaming.
Kougar wrote:Used R9 380 4GB cards are now selling quickly at $275 on ebay, and are about to hit the $300 listings. For a used, non-X, three year old rebadge of a five year old meh AMD GPU. Boggles the mind.
gargar wrote:I've had enough. Bought Xbox One X last week. This maddness is going on for too long. And RAM isn't cheap as well.
What a bad time for PC gaming.
gargar wrote:I've had enough. Bought Xbox One X last week. This maddness is going on for too long. And RAM isn't cheap as well.
What a bad time for PC gaming.
Kougar wrote:Crazy about the Massdrops for GPUs. I don't suppose there is a way to see if any GPU drops are happening in advance? That site is a pain in the ass to browse, or even search with.
DancinJack wrote:I am in the "i hate this" group, but man, I would be lying if I didn't say I'm tempted to sell my 1080 for a tidy profit.
DancinJack wrote:No offense, but I typed "GPU" into the search box a single time and it brought up all the recent GPU drops. I'm not sure I would call that a PITA to browse. I'm not saying it is the best organized site in the world, but PITA might be stretching the truth a bit. And no, there isn't really a way to see future drops. Just request GPU drops as often as you can and eventually they'll get there.
Kougar wrote:Thanks for answering the question though. Another one occurred to me, are drops secheduled at for a set time in the morning, or do they go active randomly throughout the day? Didn't see that mentioned anywhere.
DancinJack wrote:Kougar wrote:Thanks for answering the question though. Another one occurred to me, are drops secheduled at for a set time in the morning, or do they go active randomly throughout the day? Didn't see that mentioned anywhere.
There are timers on them, though IIRC they're usually listed in time of "X days left." Obviously it's different when the drops are so popular that they run out of the items though. Just keep requesting GPU drops, and you'll get notified if and when they actually do them.
For those of you thinking about buying stuff on Massdrop. Just be aware, the process is longer than you would want for the most part. The drop lasts a few days or a week, then there is an in-between time where Massdrop gets stuff ready (can be a while), then they finally ship stuff, usually a while later, and it's not always super-fast shipping. So if you're looking to get a GPU from Massdrop in five days time like you could from Newegg or Amazon, be prepared to, y'know, not get that.
DancinJack wrote:https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/01/now-even-youtube-serves-ads-with-cpu-draining-cryptocurrency-miners/
Miners are ruining everything. EVERYTHING!!!!!!!
DancinJack wrote:https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/01/now-even-youtube-serves-ads-with-cpu-draining-cryptocurrency-miners/
Miners are ruining everything. EVERYTHING!!!!!!!
Kougar wrote:Which is why I don't see cryptocurrency ever fulfilling its former goal of free, or cheap micro-payments, or at least not in any of the current incarnations.
Gandolf wrote:These prices are killing me. I currently have a HD7950 and just bought a new Ultrawide Freesync monitor. I was hoping to find a card that supports freesync until I can afford to buy a vega 64 but I can't find any cards for a reasonable price.
just brew it! wrote:I'll pretty much guarantee you that they are already aware of the effects they are having on the GPU industry, and don't care.
As far as they are concerned, it is someone else's problem.
Gandolf wrote:These prices are killing me. I currently have a HD7950 and just bought a new Ultrawide Freesync monitor. I was hoping to find a card that supports freesync until I can afford to buy a vega 64 but I can't find any cards for a reasonable price.
The Egg wrote:just brew it! wrote:I'll pretty much guarantee you that they are already aware of the effects they are having on the GPU industry, and don't care.
As far as they are concerned, it is someone else's problem.
My response would be that they all "cared" enough to go out of their way to make the algorithm ASIC-resistant (which caused the problem in the first place), so they did care about the philosophical differences; at least initially. There's also a large difference between being vaguely aware of a problem, and hearing from the people it's directly affecting. Even if it's only a 1% chance, it's worth a shot.
just brew it! wrote:The whole point of making it ASIC-resistant was to level the playing field by making it possible for people with widely available consumer hardware to participate on an even footing, instead of letting the ASIC miners have a near-monopoly. The use of consumer GPUs is a feature, not a bug!
Kougar wrote:The Egg, it's well beyond that point now. There are 1494 cryptocurrencies already. They utilize a range of different hashes and I assume the vast majority were created by different people and/or groups. Ethereum is the latest favorite coin behind the craze, but there are others.
The Egg wrote:just brew it! wrote:The whole point of making it ASIC-resistant was to level the playing field by making it possible for people with widely available consumer hardware to participate on an even footing, instead of letting the ASIC miners have a near-monopoly. The use of consumer GPUs is a feature, not a bug!
I know. And now that "widely available consumer hardware" is no longer widely available, and prices are in the stratosphere, meaning the average person can no longer participate on an even footing. It's no different than if they were using ASICs, except for the unintended side-effect of destroying the GPU and PC gaming industry.
just brew it! wrote:The Egg wrote:I know. And now that "widely available consumer hardware" is no longer widely available, and prices are in the stratosphere, meaning the average person can no longer participate on an even footing. It's no different than if they were using ASICs, except for the unintended side-effect of destroying the GPU and PC gaming industry.
I disagree that it is "no different". The cryptocurrency designers achieved their goal -- they got a lot more people to participate in their networks. So why would they want to go back to making it easy for the ASIC miners?
There's no other viable alternative to GPUs for massive quantities of cheap, widely available compute cycles.
The Egg wrote:Well, I guess you could say.......now that the GPU supply has been exhausted and cards are unobtainable at any reasonable price, they've effectively capped the number of users able to participate via that method.
The Egg wrote:If ASICs were allowed back into the fray, they'd probably come in at lower prices than a couple $1400 cards, and allow the userbase to grow again
The Egg wrote:(not to mention alleviate the pressure on GPU demand, thus lowering prices and allowing possible new user growth again).
The Egg wrote:I'm not saying this isn't a longshot --- it is for sure. At the same time, I can't see any drawback to asking. At worst they just say no. It's kinda like they say with women....if you don't talk to them, you have a 0% chance.
The Egg wrote:You guys will have to excuse some of my ignorance and lack of knowledge here, but I have a couple of questions, and then a proposition. First...
- Which specific cryptocurrencies are causing the run on GPUs?
- Of those currencies, who controls or has the ability to make changes to, the algorithms used, the difficulty increases, if/when they change from PoW to PoS, etc??
- How would we go about contacting them?
Here's where I'm going with this: Someone (ideally a group of people) ought to appeal to those in charge of the most problematic currencies, and make them aware of the damage they're causing to the GPU and gaming industries. They also need to be made aware of how their intent behind making currencies ASIC-resistant has completely and utterly failed (as proven by the current cost of GPUs, and complete destruction of their supply).
While it's true that there's no law requiring them to listen, it's still worth trying, and it doesn't cost anything to ask. It's possible that many of these guys are off in their own little bubble, and aren't even aware of some of the stuff that's happening (or the extent of it).
The Egg wrote:You guys will have to excuse some of my ignorance and lack of knowledge here, but I have a couple of questions, and then a proposition. First...
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