AMD - Zen chitchat

[Biscuit]

Doing my occation perusing of hardware to unnecissarily tempt myself, I noticed TR mobos are on scan for pre-order... prices are eye wateringly high at ~£100 more than the lowest end X299 boards. I wasnt expecting that, I was expecting roughly the same, perhaps cheaper.
Hopefully it doesnt stay like this, as that takes the shine away from the product a little bit.

[kalniel]

AMD boards seem to be expensive - for all the supposed system savings, the mobo I want (ASROCK Taichi) is £10 more on X370 than for Z270 :/

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Doing my occation perusing of hardware to unnecissarily tempt myself, I noticed TR mobos are on scan for pre-order... prices are eye wateringly high at ~£100 more than the lowest end X299 boards. I wasnt expecting that, I was expecting roughly the same, perhaps cheaper.
Hopefully it doesnt stay like this, as that takes the shine away from the product a little bit.

There was a whole lot of noise on whether the lower end X299 motherboards would play well with the very high core count Core i9 CPUs being released though.

AMD boards seem to be expensive - for all the supposed system savings, the mobo I want (ASROCK Taichi) is £10 more on X370 than for Z270 :/

Z270 is nearly EOL though,as the Z370 will be replacing it in two months time though,so the question is whether the Z370 version will be the same price and apparently from what I gather,you will need the Z390 if you want Cannon Lake compatibility - the Z370 looks more like a modified Z270,which was a modified Z170.

I would also argue that if you want to overclock,you can use a cheaper B350 motherboard instead of having to get a Z270 one,and that the Intel K series lacks a cooler and the AMD coolers are decent enough to not to warrant aftermarket cooling,unless you really want to push an overclock.

Its why even with the Core i3 7350K being £100,by the time you add the extra cost of the motherboard and cooler,you could probably get a Ryzen 5 1400 instead.

[kompukare]

Oh double dear: https://videocardz.com/71591/rumor-a...eat-for-mining

Sort of strange as the Vega FE figures were only about 30MH/s which is the same as Polaris or Hawaii. At least they will have sales I guess.

Or will they? On http://whattomine.com/ and putting in 84MH/s (because that's the same as 3 Radeon 480s according to their presets) and their default 10c per kWh (so not in the UK then), I get this:

So, $4.04 after power costs. So assuming the hashrate and prices etc. stay the same for 1 month, that's $121 before power. And historically (Ethereum hype, Litecoin hype etc.), prices and hashrates have not stayed the same. So for the 2nd month, you could assume a 30% decline of the 1st months prices (less profit since costs stay the same), so giving at most $76 for month 2. And that's probably optimistic.
Here are some numbers with from 10% to 50% decline per month:

So yes, so even with 10c per kWh it is very unlikely to be very profitable unless either prices move up a lot, or difficulty goes down a lot.

[watercooled]

Hmm, I didn't look at it in terms of ROI - you could be right then, and I don't see difficulty going down any time soon.

[kompukare]

Hmm, I didn't look at it in terms of ROI - you could be right then, and I don't see difficulty going down any time soon.

Yes, rather suspect that if I were to look up the actual difficulty increase vs price for the last few months, it would a lot closer to my 50% figures or even worse.

Problem is, certain people considering mining aren't thinking in terms of ROI either - but you'd hope the ones buying in large quantities do. Guess someone with 100s or 1,000s of might be willing to play constantly swapping coins and speculation game but then wouldn't they be better of doing day-trading?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Thats the thing,as long as it is profitable it means people can use to even pay off the cost of some of their PC.

[watercooled]

I think there's so much tulip-mania around the whole thing at the minute, a lot of people don't actually stop and think about it before rushing any buying up a ton of hardware.

[Phage]

I couldn't help myself - The bargain was too good

[watercooled]

I don't follow?

[Phage]

Apologies - I bought the entire thing 2nd hand from another Hexite

[watercooled]

Ahhh the Ryzen system in classifieds? Wasn't sure what you meant at first!

[Xlucine]

AMD selling the first half of the production run of vega to miners at inflated prices means more R&D cash to throw at whatever follows vega, which is good.

[watercooled]

True, but it doesn't help with the problems of half-broken cards flooding the second hand market down the line, or the damage to actual gaming market share caused by the transient shortages. For instance, a huge amount of mining sales wouldn't be reflected in hardware surveys from the likes of Steam - I'm not sure how much that matters?

[spacein_vader]

True, but it doesn't help with the problems of half-broken cards flooding the second hand market down the line, or the damage to actual gaming market share caused by the transient shortages. For instance, a huge amount of mining sales wouldn't be reflected in hardware surveys from the likes of Steam - I'm not sure how much that matters?

Is their any evidence of mining damaging cards? I can't see why they'd be half broken.

[scaryjim]

Is their any evidence of mining damaging cards? I can't see why they'd be half broken.

I don't know if there's any evidence, but mining rigs will tend to be run 24/7 at full chat, and pretty often the rigs are stuffed with many cards, so the chances are any ex-mining cards are going to have been hammered harder, for longer, in less ideal circumstances, than gaming cards. And length of use does impact on reliability of hardware.