Long story but i have a 3060 and 3080 i dont really need.
I was thinking of selling them but then i thought is that just a bad idea full stop:
They will hold their price as used well
I live in scotland so i have the heating on a lot (though it is gas central heating) and i wfh.
I also have and mbo and psu and ssd for them but no cpu or ram.
Seems to me i would be as well mining and using them, then sell if the price of crypto or gpus drop.
I know it woukd be nice to pass on these gpus but the main reason i am selling them is because i would be happy with 2 1080s for my needs, so i cannot justify having spent so much on them. but is selling them actually a financially bad move?
Should i buy a new cpu and ram for my desktop upgrade and mine crypto?
Obviously i am not a miner, ive just been looking at nicehash etc. For estimates of income. If they paid for themselves i would be able to keep them both, which is more than i need… but when has that ever stopped anyone :).
Selling now or later is also dependent on how much you paid for these cards. If you bought them at or near MSRP, you could make a decent profit by selling now. Waiting for crypto to crash is very risky, as everyone will be dropping their GPU’s then and there and the resulting price drop will hurt your bottom line, and probably costing you a lot more then “purchase price minus profits”, especially as you invest in new parts (CPU+RAM) for mining.
Probably best solution: get a cheap low-power CPU/APU (like 1st gen Ryzen) and cheap DDR4 2400 RAM (2x 4GB should suffice?) and mine until you paid for the upgrade, then sell the 3000 series GPU’s. First gen AMD Zen CPU/APU can be had from Aliexpress for not too much if you don’t wait too long ('cause scalpers will eventually read this too and be triggered to clear out those webshops as well!)
if you can sell now and help another gamer out it would be huge. Most people who need GPU’s cant even find one for sale used or not. And there are people out their with PC builds that have never powered on because they dont have a GPU.
I have a ASRock Z77 Pro4 motherboard and i5 processor with 32GB of ram.
I had assumed these GPUs would be incompatible, but would they actually run just with sub-optimal PCI bus bandwidth (which is probably irrelevant for mining). I can put the fancy new PSU in i guess too. the old one is an artic 750w i think from 2011.
I am thinking that I could give the 3060 to my son as a bit of big birthday present basically. thinking about how crypto may keep growing this year and chip shortages seem full on for another year. so why not live a little, a 3060 as MSRP is not too bad.
If i can run the 3080 on my old mbo while i save up for a new cpu and ram then i could have a very nice machine too.
that way we can both game together
we have both been looking for something like a 1070 or 1080 for about year now assuming there was going to be some kind of let up at some point. i bought these just because they happened to appear on newegg while i was browsing and it was the closest thing to an opportunity i had seen in a while… but now that i have them i am thinking maybe i can make it work somehow.
Yeah, PCIe gen 3 vs gen 4 isn’t really that big of a deal for most home users. Even if you’re not really into mining, and you can make it work without too many ancillary upgrades, then yeah give it a shot and see if you can’t make use of the hardware you already have. It’s probably going to be a while before you could easily get something else that’s comparable.
Its is largely irrelevant for everything at the moment. Up until now Intel did not even have a PCIe 4 option. The card will work fine and in would be surprised if you have any noticeable performance loss anywhere.
… and that’s assuming you don’t hold the ether for a couple of years, see 2-3x growth (like I did, I’m up 7x).
i.e., my little RX480 paid for the pair of Vega 64s I bought in 2017 several times over in today’s value. And I still have/am holding the crypto for further growth.
oooft… so i plugged the 3060 into my i5… i thought i could see if i could set up mining and test it etc. to consider the whole situation (seeing as overall i think i will give that to my son)…
turns out the issue i thought was my 1050ti, may actually me my motherboard. I installed the 3060 and all was fine, but when i switched to pci-e as the main graphics the OS failed to load in the same way as my 1050ti
when i am done crying and i can face my computer again i will let you know what i end up doing. (my sons pc is not here… i only have 1 semi working desktop).