NVIDIA doesn't care about you they don't care about gamers and they don't care
about the environment the truth of the matter is that to basically any company
that's beholden to its shareholders you are nothing more than a living wallet on
legs if you imagine it any other way then congratulations
you played yourself no while NVIDIA employs some very good
people talented engineers passionate gamers
the top priority for NVIDIA the company is their stock price and the move they
just made demonstrates this perfectly i'm talking of course about the launch
of their cmp or cryptocurrency mining
processor a product NVIDIA claims was inspired by their obsession with gaming
yeah i don't think that's going to be hard to debunk so let's get started
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for the uninitiated this isn't the first time NVIDIA has created a product
specifically for cryptocurrency mining remember the gp 106 that we gamed on
using a hacked driver back in 2019 that was basically the same idea it was a gtx
1060 but with a cheap cooler no display outputs and a locked down driver that
served only to ensure that once its usefulness as a mining card had run its
course no gamer could ever enjoy it the
difference is that last time the program was run quietly through board partners
and then just as quietly faded into the shadows when crypto crashed in 2018
it was that crash along with unexceptional performance that meant
that miners didn't care about the rtx 20 series so we got an entire generation of
relatively sane pricing and availability we thought the worst of it was over we
were wrong now GPU mining gets a full fat products page on NVIDIA.com and a
blog post announcing new cards dedicated to it if you want a good laugh you can
go ahead and read the blog post but here's the highlights starting with the
upcoming rtx 3060 g-force cards will be
locked to deliver only half of their true hash rate in cryptocurrency mining
operations cmp cards by contrast will be fully
unlocked NVIDIA then goes on to talk about what a win this is for gamers
because crypto miners will certainly find no way around the unhackable driver
that limits performance on what will probably be their best selling GPU of
the generation but we've got a problem here that is
aside from a software lock being unbeatable NVIDIA's claim that they care
who buys their gpus they are still gpus by the way they are not cmps are just
words let's look instead at NVIDIA's actions if they really didn't want
miners buying these things like for realsies they would have just left it at
a driver block and sold the chips exclusively to gamers under the GeForce
banner but no within the perfect storm we find ourselves in what with the
global chip shortage scalpers and bots with nothing better to do and a mining
boom thanks to surging cryptocurrency prices what clearly happened is NVIDIA spotted
an opportunity for profit first and then came up with a story later to make it
look like they're doing something to improve the situation for gamers
here's a couple of holes we can easily poke in NVIDIA's story
number one silicon production is finite so every
mining GPU they make has the potential to be a gaming GPU that they didn't make
number two these gpus will have practically zero value in the second
hand market depriving future gamers of what otherwise might be a great deal on
ebay a couple years down the road this accelerates the race at which these
cards will turn into worthless e-waste let's go into these in more depth then
we are in the midst of a worldwide silicon shortage that is so severe that
even car manufacturers are suffering let that sink in for a second
car manufacturers are having trouble keeping up with their production because
they can't get chips and yet NVIDIA claims to be doing gamers a solid by
setting aside a stash specifically for a task that they'll become obsolete for as
soon as the next crypto slump we reached out to NVIDIA about this and their
response was that these new gpus will in no way impact GeForce production because
cmp gpus are optimized for mining and
don't meet the g4 specification anyway
well that actually sounds okay in theory but
how can we know that history has taught us time and time
again that even products that were specifically created to make some kind
of use out of silicon that otherwise wouldn't have made the cut
eventually because of demand will get filled with otherwise fully functioning
silicon i mean just look at AMD's triple core cpus from back in the phenom days
within a matter of months practically all of them were unlockable with a BIOS
hack to quad core and heck we even did a
video about an NVIDIA product that could be unlocked the MSI GeForce gtx 465 twin
frozer2 golden edition that's a mouthful could actually be turned into a gtx 470
with a simple BIOS mod the success rate for those wondering i flashed over 100
of them personally was about 75 now the reason for this phenomenon is
that as manufacturing matures the number of defective samples actually drops and
eventually in order to keep making your value products you need to start
artificially cutting down your premium ones
so for that reason even if we take NVIDIA's word for it 100 percent that no
GeForce gpus are going to go into cmp cards it's a foregone conclusion that
good gpus will end up in these mining cards eventually
and that's not even considering the fact that in simpler times these
semi-defective gpus probably would have ended up in a cheaper ko sku or
something like that that would have benefited gamers
rather than participating in environmentally devastating levels of energy consumption in the pursuit of
free cash bringing us to point number two these gpus will never make it into
gamers hands no matter what compromises gamers would have been willing to accept
i mean it's pretty unrealistic to think that another gp 106 like driver hack is
going to delay their trip to the landfill and furthermore i think given the
literal billions of dollars at play here it's far more likely that a driver mod
to bypass the hash rate restrictions on GeForce products or some other kind of
work from the crypto community to make hashing on them harder to detect will
happen and all cmp is going to do is guaranteed GPU supply for miners
which at the end of the day is just fine by NVIDIA because the fewer low-cost
alternatives exist for consumers the more likely it is that people will go
buy a shiny new GPU rather than look to facebook marketplace or to craigslist
because don't kid yourself NVIDIA remembers what happened with the rtx 20
series launch the recommendation from most reviewers including us by the way
was to ignore rtx 20 series and just go buy a used gtx 1080 or 1080 ti instead
and there were plenty of used 10 series gpus to be found because of
that's right the crypto boom and bust that had just occurred but Linus you
might say no gamer wants a crypto card anyway it's
all worn out well that's where you're only sort of right i mean yeah some of
them died of course but many of the cards that were mined on for years still
had plenty of life left in them because most knowledgeable mining operators
actually undervolt the cards both to reduce their heat output and to reduce
their power consumption so NVIDIA is actually playing a pretty
clever game here covering their bottom line both today and tomorrow by ensuring
that when this mining boom ends which it inevitably will these cards don't end up
flooding the secondhand market and incentivizing people to buy used which
leads us to the subject of the predictable final resting place for
these cards the landfill with no way to recoup some of their cost
by selling their used cards the best possible outcome is that crypto miners
will send them to an electronics recycler but here's a dirty little secret
very little actually gets recycled from a product like this i mean even if you
could economically pull all the gold and other precious metals from a fully
manufactured product like this and by all accounts you realistically can't
you're still left with a pile of ceramics pcbs and plastics that aren't
going anywhere anytime soon the problem of e-waste and the wider environmental
impact of the tech industry has been growing for long enough that we are now
rightly scrutinizing companies for things as small as single-use plastics
packaging but before you get upset steve and i love
gaming just as much as you do we're not saying that you need to feel bad for
enjoying your life and stop buying video cards altogether we're just saying that
of the three r's reduce and reuse come
before recycle for a good reason and NVIDIA is intentionally ignoring both of
them these are single-use gpus designed to be
discarded this is 100 a move by NVIDIA to cover their own asses and there are
zero facts given about gamers no matter how hard they scream that their focus is
g-force the p106 100 changed absolutely nothing
about the short supply last time and it won't change anything today NVIDIA is
not your friend and you shouldn't defend this bull the good news though is that
i'm going to tell NVIDIA right here and now how to fix this for gamers
let's see if they do it NVIDIA you need to unlock the 3060 driver and hold on
i'm sure someone is going to throw this up on r slash unpopular hot takes or
whatever but gamers think about the bigger picture
here for a second we just explained to you how
realistically crypto miner is going to crypto mine it's not gonna have any
impact on pricing or availability today and at least it ensures that as crypto
falls and miners start losing money and liquidating their assets patient gamers
will reap a veritable bounty of cheap GPU attendees so diamond hands gamers
diamond hands not that it matters anyway because the truth is NVIDIA is too
greedy arrogant or both to actually do it that's probably a separate video
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maybe have a look at the one we did actually gaming on that previous p106
mining card it demonstrates pretty well why we are so upset about these
arbitrary and artificial restrictions i shouldn't say arbitrary it's not
arbitrary it's got a clear it's got a clear intent