If you’re looking for a “lightly used mining GPU” for your gaming PC on eBay, Craigslist, or Offerup, I’m here to tell you not to.
My position is not new, but it is different. While experts will say that buying a used graphics card for mining can Being very low risk – as long as the miner knew what he or she was doing – my argument against buying that GPU for mining goes beyond technical reasons: general principle.
GPU crypto miners, you see, are the ones who have spent the last two years buying every graphics card they could possibly have, forcing you, the PC gamer, to use old, moldy hardware that is way past its age or insanely high. prices to pay for a GPU. Yes, supply chain issues also contributed to shortages, but most believe that miners should take the lion’s share of the blame for the GPU shortage. I largely agree.
New card from AMD or Nvidia released? Forget it, it will be instantly taken out of existence by crypto miners before it ever sees the inside of your gaming rig. Nvidia releasing a card specifically designed to prevent crypto miners from using them? Just a speed bump before those GPUs are enslaved in Kessel’s crypto mines.
Now that the wheels have finally come off the crypto wagon in recent months, those same miners are now looking to unload those GPUs they’re banking on at overly inflated prices.
No one really knows what made the “average crypto miner” but let’s take the example of this miner who was profiled on CNBC earlier this year. He operated 261 GPU mining machines and was making, by his own estimates, about $110,000 a month. In the case of that miner, I don’t know if he decided to throw in the towel or not, nor how much he sold those used GPUs when he did, but I suspect, as with most miners, some of the store closing calculation is to “recoup” the investment in those cards by selling them at the highest price the used market will bear.
That’s the part that really sticks with me: If you’ve made thousands of dollars a month mining, you’ve already recouped the price of those GPUs tenfold. It’s like an oil company that buys an oil rig for $10 million, makes $200 million by pumping oil, then sells that great used drill for $8 million (barely used).
I won’t take down a miner for making the kill he or she has – more power to them in fact because they are such successful go-getters. But do you have to be so damn greedy that you can’t sell that card at a reasonable price to give those PC gamers the break they so deserve?
But no, when I peruse my GPUs on Ebay, it doesn’t seem like it. An ad I saw was pushing a mining rig (basically a crappy PC in an open frame case with expansion cards) with a single GeForce RTX 3060 Ti for $840. There don’t seem to be any great deals on used mining cards that I see. If you are a miner who liquidates at super low prices, well, thanks. But most used mining GPUs are not such a great deal. Well, at least not the great deals I’d expect from folks who probably have Gulfstream G6 sales reps at their door.
Used GPUs may be great value for money, but I won’t give cryptominers any of my money.
Thiago Trevisan
Of course they are not. Business is business. And I get that. If I were sitting on a billion dollars worth of cryptocurrency mined with GPUs (full disclosure: I’ve never mined a dollar in all that time), I probably wouldn’t care either. I’d like to use the money sold by selling those GPUs to invest in a seized superyacht instead of worrying about other people’s problems.
However, what I can control is my own money – and I’m not buying a used mining card on a general principle. Some have criticized my view and believe that the gal should be aimed at the graphics card vendors who have also benefited greatly from GPU mining in recent years. Could more have been done by them? Possibly, maybe even probably. But what I do know is that at least AMD and Nvidia have both tried to get GPUs into the hands of gamers to see most of them being diverted to miners. And perhaps both are seeing their own karmic payback these days as GPU sales crumble.
In the end, there’s just something galactically wrong with buying a used graphics card that someone made a huge profit off at 80 percent of its suggested retail price. Suffice it that instead of buying that card, I’d rather tell them to take that card and put it where the RGB won’t shine, especially now that prices for new graphics cards are plummeting.
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