Amd

[mojothejester]

Hey everyone :-)

Due to mining, most AMD R9 280X's are out of stock. I'm looking to build a good gaming PC this year, and was wondering what people's thoughts were on a couple of 7870 tahiti GPU's in crossfire? I know they'll perform quite well, and you can pick two up for about £300.

Would any of you pick that option? Or would you just wait for R9 280X to be in stock? Or maybe just get a GTX 770?

Cheers

[Willzzz]

I'd try to go single card if possible.

The Tahiti cards can run quite hot, so 2 could be tricky, it will also take more power.
Leaving aside all the potential CF problems.

[Butuz]

For £320-340 go for a R9 290 every day of the week

[mojothejester]

I was thinking of the 290, but would rather have a custom cooled one. So maybe save a bit extra and go for windforce 290 or gtx 780 then?

[kompukare]

The Litecoin crazy must be almost over everywhere nevermind in countries like the UK where electricity prices are high (say $0.25 per kWh).

Using the online Litecoin calculators with a system draw of 300W and a hash rate of 650KH/s currently works out at $3.23 profit ($5.03 less $1.80 of electricity) per 24 hours. So that's under £2 per day and the difficulty will continue to rise. Optimistically, that means the next month might bring in £60 with the month after that (assuming £1 per day profit since difficulty goes up but electricity costs stay the same) £30. So for a £250-£300 investment, £90 is about the most profit one could realistically expect. And selling those excess cards in a few months time will lose most of that £90 especially for those buying cards at an inflated price.

Now, there are other scrypt coins and I suppose someone very lucky might occasionally mine one of those and quickly dump them before they crash but that's even riskier.

So, I'd say give it a few more weeks and the litecoin mining crazy will be over and Tahitia and Hawaii cards should settle back to normal.

[Agent]

£90 is about the most profit one could realistically expect

Crazy talk.

1 Bitcoin is worth around £540 currently.

I once sold several hundred of them for less than that.

No one knows what the price is going to do. That £90 could very easily and quickly become £900 if some big service was to adopt them.
A lot of people are not doing LC or any other X-coin because of the immediate cash out value. The profit that's made is time dependant (it can go down too!).

But to suggest a maximum profit value....madness

[kompukare]

Well, GPU SHA256 (bitcoin) mining is dead due to ASICs. (A 280X get's around 650MH/s and at current difficulty would take 9,000 days to mine one BTC at a cost of around £10,000 in electricity.)

And while there are no scrypt ASICs (yet), Litecoin profitability is almost finished too. Those figures I quoted are not an unreasonable extrapolation of the past few months trends but of course I'm not psychic.

Still if I was psychic I would just play the lotto. Or even if I was reasonably sure of future prices I could just buy LTC or BTC and hold.

Of course, I don't know whether people mining are cashing out right away (one often quote strategy is to sell half or so now to pay for expenses and hold the rest but there are many variants). But many of those who have invested £100s may very well be cashing out immediately at least until they have covered their hardware costs. And the ones getting in late may never recover those costs while people who got in earlier and who have covered their equipment costs may very well be causing this Radeon shortage.

[Butuz]

This "radeon shortage" was caused by AMD killing off the 7950 and 7970 quickly and not releasing large volumes of 280/290/290X into retail, thus causing a temporary shortage and price hikes. They basically released the new series at a low price, waited for the NVidia killing reviews to come in, then constrained supply and forced prices up. Same strategy as not allowing partner cards to release custom designs and coolers from day 1. I don't really understand the strategy myself. You'll see large amounts of cards coming into stock now that partner cards are out.

Now, Crypto also exploded at the wrong time, during this strategy which left some countries (such as USA) almost out of stock. Crypto contributed to the problem but did not cause it.

Either way, there are plenty of r290 in stock, I see no reason not to buy one!

Butuz

[watercooled]

Any evidence for the above? Manufacturers already had Tahiti GPUs from 7970 for their 280X cards, so the 'blame AMD' theory doesn't make a whole lot of sense. By deliberately constraining supply, they'd only be hurting themselves - it's the *retailers* that put their prices up, AMD get the same amount of money for selling the silicon to vendors either way. And this combined with stock shortages potentially pushes people to competitor products. So at the end of the day they would be selling less products at the same price, and therefore making less money. Yeah good strategy that...

The reference-only design 290/X is a different matter, but a possible explanation would be that it was a rapid release - the cards are assembled for AMD, and then shipped to vendors who can stick their logos on and get them to shops quickly. Again, forcing a reference cooler for any other reason makes little sense. The reference-only strategy would, and has, only hurt the reputation of the card, for example with less knowledgeable reviewers and fanboys calling it a 'hot GPU', which of course makes no sense since heat basically equals power draw, which is pretty much identical to a 780 even when running at 95C (higher temp increases power draw) - i.e. the same cooler used on a 780 would mean similar temps, with allowances for the smaller AMD die meaning higher thermal density.

Cryptocurrencies may not be the only reason, with Christmas purchasing being another factor, but the 'blame AMD' theory is completely nonsensical.

Some people were quick enough to pull the 'blame AMD' card for Titan's pricing (lack of competition as the cited reason). So should we blame Nvidia for the current situation, for not having anything remotely competitive at mining?

Back to the OP's question though, I'd also say that a single faster GPU is generally the better option.

[Butuz]

You do realise that the *entire* Crypto GPU market currently stands at using approx. 0.1%* of 2013's combined Add in Board sales?

Are you suggesting that a less than 0.03% jump in AMD sales in two months would cause massive worldwide GPU shortages and price hikes?

I am not sure who is being completely nonsensical here

*this is the reason why Nvidia couldn't give two hoots about crypto

Butuz

[watercooled]

The entire AIB market is irrelevant - the miners are only really interested in the high-end GPUs (which themselves only make up a fairly small percentage of the market), of which they consume a significant portion, you know, the cards that are currently out of stock or price-hiked...

Nvidia overcharging? Blame AMD
Intel overclacrging? Blame AMD
AMD prices being ramped *by the retailers*? Blame AMD

You've also ignored most of my post explaining why blaming AMD or accusing them of inflating prices is utter nonsense. AMD sells to AIB partners at a pretty constant price, the AIBs likewise sell the cards wholesale at a fairly constant price. It is the RETAILERS who are inflating prices, which is why prices here and the rest of Europe have managed to stay put, while they're crazy high in the US. Were either AMD or the AIBs inflating the prices, it would affect the entire market, which it quite clearly isn't...

You only have to spent 5 seconds on Google to find plenty of evidence for this. They have different theories why the crypro curencies are inflating prices - some cite supply and demand, some claim retailers are being opportunistic and charging higher prices because they know they can get away with it - the cards are still attractive to miners who are still clearing the shelves as soon as they're in stock. Were it gamers buying these cards, surely they'd all be going to Nvidia in the US where the AMD prices are sky high? Nope, the AMD cards are still selling - take a look at the sales volumes, they're not down like you'd expect were it some misguided AMD marketing tactic.

Edit: Oh and of course I was being sarcastic about blaming Nvidia (at least I thought it was obvious). It makes as much sense as the trend of blaming AMD for any problems in the tech market though.

Edit2: Apologies to the OP, feel free to ignore these posts as they bear no impact on your buying decision.

[watercooled]

Here are two articles with interesting views if you're interested:
http://www.coindesk.com/litecoin-radeon-shortage/
http://www.techpowerup.com/196320/wh...md-radeon.html

Both are disputing the 'worldwide shortage' theory (which I've never made BTW) but suggesting the gouging retailer theory. As the first one says, supply and demand is a *very* fine balancing act - there's not much in it between decent stock levels at retailers and everywhere being back to pre-orders - at the end of the day the total sales volume might be pretty much the same (hence, short-term sales volumes tell us little in this scenario) as it takes time to adjust to sudden spikes. And then, they have to weigh up if it's worth risking increasing production in case the craze subsides (increased difficulty or whatever) and they're left with a load of excess stock to shift.