ELI5; why CMP video cards has no resale value?

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[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfIibTBaoMM&t=61s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfIibTBaoMM&t=61s)

can someone please explain to me why are this ‘cmp’ cards bad for second hand market?

In: Technology

4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

From how I understand it, the mining cards aren’t going to be particularly good for anything besides mining — they won’t come with any output ports, so you can’t game on them, and probably won’t be optimized for pretty much any other use case besides mining. Therefore, they’ll be useful *only* for cryptocurrency mining, and they only have value as long as they’re profitable to mine with.

Once they are no longer profitable to mine with, there is not really much else you can do with it, so it loses its value entirely, whereas with a traditional, older graphics cards, they will still at least keep some of their value for people trying to build a previous-gen gaming PC at a bargain. For example, when the 3080 becomes no longer profitable to mine with, and the 4000 series comes out, you can still game on the 3080 and for many people it’ll probably be good enough.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because you need to jump through a bunch of hoops to get it to work as a GPU like modding the BIOS or drivers. People will also assume that the chips are the ones that didn’t make the cut as a GPU so they were “defective”.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because gamers often buy older video cards that are cheaper, basically there is a market for them, and it’s quite big.

On the other hand, cryptocurrency people will use their cards until they no longer work, and will use not just one, but possibly hundreds of computers all mining the cryptocurrency. So once they decide to upgrade, thousands of these CMP cards will flood the market, and who will buy them? Not cryptocurrency people, they want the best. Not gamers either, cause these cards don’t work for games.

Anonymous 0 Comments

They’re graphics cards, but without the “graphics” portion. They have most of the parts of a graphics card, but there’s no HDMI ports, etc. They’re only for computational jobs, mainly cryptocurrency mining.

Who would buy one second hand? Without graphical outputs, you can’t connect a monitor to them. So they’re almost useless for games. So gamers will probably not want them. Businesses running computational/scientific jobs aren’t going to be interested in them because they lack the features that Quadro cards have (eg: lots of RAM, ability to connect 2 cards together, more reliable parts). Crypto miners probably won’t want them because… well, if cryptominers are selling them, they’re probably not profitable for cryptomining any more.

Second hand graphics cards can be useful in games with the settings turned down, or lower resolution monitors. (I find it strange to say 1080p is a low resolution these days). But without that option, the second hand market for them dries up very quickly. That means they’re garbage when miners don’t want them any more.