After a whole year of digital currency boom in 2021, it has also led to a sharp increase in the price of graphics cards, the original price of 5499 yuan RTX 3080 once sold to nearly 20,000 yuan, and even GTX 1060, which has been listed for five or six years, the price has also risen above the original listing price. In the "torment" of more than a year, some consumers have gritted their teeth and chosen to buy graphics cards at high prices, some consumers have chosen to turn to console/mobile games, and some consumers have said that they have become numb.
However, the recent news can be described as a flat thunder in the DIY circle, so that the majority of players have become melon eating masses. On March 12, there was news that when Shenzhen Meilin Customs and Huanggang Customs conducted a joint inspection of a company's goods declared for import from Huanggang Port, they found that 3 of the graphics card labels had traces of being covered by other labels, and after identification, the actual specifications and models of 5840 graphics cards did not match the declaration, and the value of the goods exceeded 20 million yuan.
Changing high-value product models to low-priced products is clearly a typical method of evading tariffs. However, it is interesting that after the official release of relevant news, the brand's domestic official website was immediately closed, showing that it was being upgraded and maintained, and its Tmall flagship store had no products for sale, and the Jingdong flagship store only had a few products left.
In this regard, some netizens ridiculed that the brand has often sold a variety of overseas graphics cards, originally thought that it was similar to foreign trade tail orders or export to domestic sales, did not expect that it was actually a "real overseas version". And this is not the most alarming for players, as can be seen in the official video, the graphics card packaging shown is a red foam bag, not a conventional electrostatic bag, and the gold finger part is not equipped with the card sleeve that the new product should have. From this information, it can be seen that it is very likely that the protection measures that new products should be, so it is also considered to be a secondary renovation of the mining card.
After the weekend of fermentation, the brand then issued a statement on the social platform saying that the graphics cards purchased by consumers on officially authorized e-commerce platforms and retail stores have been strictly tested by the factory and meet the Chinese 3C quality certification standards, and there is no "mining card refurbishment" and "secondary sales", please rest assured that consumers can use it.
So, is this batch of seized graphics cards a second-refurbished mining card, and is the brand's recent behavior "no silver three hundred and two here"?
Netizens speculated that this batch of graphics cards is refurbished, which is obviously not unfounded. It should be known that in the last mining disaster, that is, when the price of digital currency was cut in 2018, a large number of mining cards flowed into the second-hand market, which really "pitted" a considerable number of consumers. And more importantly, after using a graphics card for mining, it is far less difficult to renovate than everyone thinks.
Usually, the graphics card mining "mining" is Ethereum, not Bitcoin, Ethereum's mining algorithm is called Ethash, is a memory-intensive (memory-hard) algorithm, the main bottleneck lies in the video memory, so the bandwidth of the video memory also determines the speed of mining, and the core of the graphics card, that is, the part produced by NVIDIA and AMD is responsible for computing. Obviously, in the digital currency market with extremely frequent price fluctuations, in order to maximize utilization, miners will naturally choose "overclocked memory" to increase the speed of mining.
This means that the most vulnerable part of a graphics card that has been "exercised" by the mine is the video memory. In addition to the video memory, the power supply MOS tube and capacitor are also more easily damaged, after all, the mining card is 7X24 hours of operation, which also makes the "tried and tested" power supply part of the life is often not long. As for the key GPU that affects the maintenance value of the graphics card, mining to burn this chip will often only appear on high-end models, because its power supply part is full of material and more durable, so it causes that in a long-term high load environment, the GPU will be damaged before the power supply part.
In simple terms, the GPU that really makes the graphics card repair value zero is not easy to damage in mining, so this also brings opportunities for mining card refurbishment.
Therefore, no matter what happens in this file, it is obviously not a good time to buy a graphics card. Since last summer, all provinces across the country have begun to investigate digital currency mining, resulting in the domestic market mining power can only choose to go to sea, at the same time, the recession in the digital currency market has lasted for nearly half a year.
Taking Ethereum as an example, after the high point in November last year, the price has fallen all the way in the past four months, shrinking by about 45% compared with the peak period. Even the black swan event between Russia and Ukraine did not activate the legendary safe-haven attribute of digital currencies. And all this also makes the income of 100Mhash/s hashrate now hover around 25 yuan for a long time, and the static return cycle is about ten months. You should know that at this time last year, the minimum payback cycle of the graphics card is usually 100 days, so this huge uncertainty is enough to make many miners choose to quit.
And counterintuitively, the moment when the "mining disaster" comes, it is the time when everyone needs to be most cautious. Because in the "mine tide" period, the graphics cards sold on the market, whether the tube is first-hand or second-hand, as long as the price is not particularly outrageous, there will always be miners who will buy it and take it to mining, which makes the graphics card that can be bought by the player not much mining card. But when the "mining disaster" comes, there will inevitably be miners who step on the shipment, making a huge number of mining cards pour into the market.
What is more fatal is that the word mining card is not written directly on the packaging of the graphics card, and recognition can only be done by professionals such as graphics card manufacturers. But the question is, are graphics card manufacturers and consumers really one heart? What has happened in the past year or so has proven that graphics card manufacturers will only manage to sell goods, and as for whether the goods are really sold to players, there are actually few people who care about this.
So unless you have 100,000 urgent things to buy a graphics card right now, it is recommended that you wait for the NVIDIA RTX 40 series, or AMD's RDNA3, which will be released this year.