Sapphire is releasing mining only versions their GPU - We look at the economics of it !
AMD have beaten Nvidia to the post with the release of the very first Cryptocurrency dedicated
mining GPU. Sapphire will be releasing their RX 470 and RX 560 cards dedicated to mining very
soon with pre-release versions showing up in China.
They will be releasing a range of RX 470 mining addition cards starting at £249 the RX 560 will will retail at £170.
Most of these cards will not have ports of any kind are the RX 560. The RX 470 will hit 25 to 28 MHz similar to
their full blown versions.
These cards with will only come with a one-year reduced warranty alluding to their high intensity use.
Given that these cards will only be slightly cheaper than their full-blown cousins and considering that
their resale value will be very low, I am unsure if this is a good move with by Sapphire and AMD.
So let's look at the economics of purchasing one of these cards:
Regular RX 470 Mining RX 470
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EST: $170 USD EST: $150 USD
Hashrate: 25–28 MH/s Hash rate: 25–28 MH/s
ROI: 2-3 months ROI: 2 -3 months
Resale: $100 USD Resale: $0 – $20 USD
The reason I chose to estimate the mining RX 470’s resale value as $0-$20 is the fact that once these cards have become unprofitable and you try to sell them on eBay etc, buyers will know that this GPU was purchased solely for mining and therefore has probably been thrashed to within an inch of its life. Would you be willing to purchase one of these used on eBay ?
If this move will increase the amount of GPU's on the market for gamers and the like considering the current shortage, then so be it but personally, I cannot see this move from paying off. What do you think ?
you show the hashrate the same, but that's not out of the box, right?
that's tweaking clocks/voltages with some closed source, windows bloat/spyware? That's not an acceptable option for me.
also, i don't know if potential lost resale value matters much to me. i'm not a gamer. i'm not going to want to upgrade because a new card/game comes out and need to sell my card(s). i'm going to use the card for mining until it dies.
i see a lot of hand-wringing from gamers about these mining cards, when gamers should be happy, as miners can buy mining cards and gamers can get cards that are clocked differently and might not be sold out due to mining. It also makes dedicated mining cards easily identifiable in the second hand market. Win-win.
I have only read that the hashrates will be about the same so yes, there would be
some tweaking involved. I think that potential resale value would still come into
consideration for a lot of miners though when calculating a break even point.
As long as Sapphire Etc can keep up with the production, it may help everyone
out but I think the jury is still very much out on these cards. It would make me
think twice. Still, some gamers would probably look at ex-mining cards anyway
if they have been modded as I have heard that some games do not like that.
So there is that too.
Yes, I imagine that would be with tweaks, etc.
A lot of people seem to factor in resale value when determining ROI.
If you plan to mine till they die, you're ROI will be longer.
As long as AMD can produce the same amount of both mining a
non-mining cards, it is a win-win.