GPU Miners, where to get used GPU's?

Some history…

I’m currently using Blender to render models on my 2080. Last month I was browsing a pair of 3070’s for $1K each on Amazon (that was a Canadian price BTW) but I stalled on the purchase because I felt it was too high. Tonight however that pricing looks like a bargain.

I did some crude research and it seems that some Blender artists have been able to stick headless mining GPU’s into their rigs and successfully use them as a render GPU. For example.

Seems that as long as the mining card is used for CUDA tasks then I should be fine.

So the question is this — where are these cards? Anyone know where I can find cards being retired? I tried ebay as a start but just found junk, old 1080’s or worse.

I have a spare 1050TI which I tossed into my rig tonight but it was so slow compared to the 2080 that it couldn’t finish rendering a single 1024 tile while the 2080 completed 11 tiles.

I found a lot of cards on ebay dude

I’d recommend watching Linus’s rant on crypto cards from the other day.

Mining cards - even older ones - have become more sparse and expensive since crypto has started to climb again. The midrange P106 cards (based on the same GPU as the 1060), were the most available during the last boom, and are still available, but they’re no where near as performant as you’d like, and their price is generally inflated fourfold compared to where they sat a year ago.

Annoyingly, right now, laptops appear to have the only semi-consistent supply, but they’re all cut down from the desktop counterparts, and having a leaf blower around while you’re rendering isn’t a nice prospect.

Now would be a good time to look at CPU-based rendering…

I’ve been looking at doing a MAAS style setup for stuff like this. I have a lot of compute power in combined machines, so I’m thinking about network render for stuff.

Theres also older cards like the GRID K2 that could be flashed to be a tesla. They have a good amount of CUDA cores and a large chunk of ram, ever thought about those?

Equally you can just chuck a bunch of cards into a rig and build a render box out of older cards?

I’ll be watching this thread :eyes:

Older Teslas-Grids / Firepros can be had, at reasonable pricings… Main trouble would be, that they’re constructed [idyllically] for 2U+ Server usage [ALL the case whirlin’ CFM]. Look into molded / 3D Print end fan-blower attachments, if you’re aiming for conventional pc build

I have a K20X supporting FAH [GPU work is less frequent recently] and a K2000 for Display

I just put a hole in the side of mine and have it vent out the side of the case.

There are diff coolers available now tho.

That is not stopping them. Laptop mining is becoming a thing because GPUs are so hard to get now and mining is worth enough to justify it.

Unfortunately unless you want to pay more the 2080 is it for now.

And as fas as I know they were 10 series cards that were the headless mining cards, so worse than your 2080 already. There is new 30xx based headless mining cards coming but expect those to be vastly over priced and also unavailable.

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That is the stupidest thing I have ever seen.

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Stupid until you see a 3070 Mobile has about the same hash rate (and render performance (keeping this on topic lol)) as a 2080 Ti.

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Not that its all that off topic.

I’ve looked at some of the cards on eBay and am not really interested in the older 1060 through 1080 or older Tesla cards. I’m also not trying to build a rig but merely adding a second card to my own computer — so adding a card comparable to the existing 2080 Super is the ideal scenario. As stated, I tested a 1050TI which I have here and it actually slowed down my render times.

So what I’m looking at now are faulty GPU’s with artifacting. I’d like to get my hands on these older 2080 cards which were failing in the early days with screen drawing — ie, the cards would display endless artifacts on screen.

My understanding of the internals of a GPU are limited. However, I’m guessing that the CUDA cores themselves have little, if anything, to do with actually running the display.

I found a number of these faulty 2080 GPUs on eBay but they quickly shot up to $800 which … [1] I find expensive for a hobbled card and [2] it’s pricey for testing my theory that the CUDA cores would work just fine.

I’ll just have to wait until the summer/fall.

2060KO’s are 2080’s with some shit turned off. Have the same compute tho, bet the same hash rate too.

Just uh, just a note.

Turing had some majorly low yields.
2060KO = Poor binned 2080s [*not meeting CUDA / RTX / a/o combination count desired quotas]. Having that honker of chip, with less chutzpuh engagement, could also mean better thermal management [20% larger die area, over a reg. 2060; ~65% processing power of 2080], even with recycling a 1660s’ thermal solution.
Similar premise, with Super chips [with nowhere near the level of dialing back]