Gigabyte releases a P104-100 4GB Mining Processor

[Gregster]

Dedicated mining graphics cards are not new, delivering shorter warranties, and a diminished feature set when compared to their gaming-oriented equivalent. The benefit of these cards is their lower pricing, as well as potential power savings due to the lack of several unnecessary components, which is ideal for cryptocurrency miners where profit is key.

Gigabyte has now revealed their GV-NP104D5X-4G graphics card, delivering some unique specifications derived from Nvidia's GP104 silicon. What Gigabyte is offering here is a graphics processor with the same CUDA core count as a GTX 1070 with GDDR5X memory, delivering specifications that are somewhere between a GTX 1070 and GTX 1080. The GPU itself only comes with 4GB of VRAM, which will help to make the card more affordable and will feature 4x PCIe 3.0 wiring, which is much less than the 16 lanes that gaming oriented graphics cards utilise.

Aside from these the direct downgrades in VRAM capacity and PCIe bandwidth, this graphics card also comes with no display outputs, making this card useless for anything outside of compute. The card comes with a single 8-pin PCIe connection for power and uses a simple aluminium heat stack with a triple fan cooler design.

https://overclock3d.net/news/gpu_displays/gigabyte_releases_a_p104-100_4gb_mining_processor/1

Doesn't interest me in the slightest but I am sure it does some people.

 

[Rroff]

Hmm I thought GDDR5 generally did better for crypto unless they've tuned the timings, etc. maybe.

 

[Telecaster]

I think one of the things attracting miners to retail GPUs is that there is a decent resale with them, mining specific cards whilst cheaper initially are pretty much worthless 2nd hand.

They'd have to be really cheap for me to consider swapping all mine for these.

 

[Rroff]

I think one of the things attracting miners to retail GPUs is that there is a decent resale with them, mining specific cards whilst cheaper initially are pretty much worthless 2nd hand.

They'd have to be really cheap for me to consider swapping all mine for these.

I suspect a lot of these will be bought by educational places and smaller businesses that use compute for R&D, etc. who'll find it hard to justify the costs of things like Tesla for their uses.

 

[humbug]

How much cheaper? they would have to be much cheaper and i can't see them being cheap enough.

The problem with coin mining is it is extremely volatile and without display outputs these card's are worthless if it all comes crashing down, so unless they really are cheap these things will not sell well, people will continue to buy the gaming cards because at least with them if it all goes wrong they still have card's they can sell on.

Also, the best and most popular mining cards are still the Polaris architectures, and Vega with a few tweaks has a MASSIVE hashing rate and that per watt, much higher than anything nVidia have.

These days even Ryzen CPU's are better for mining than some nVidia Pascal graphics cards.

Hmm I though GDDR5 generally did better for crypto unless they've tuned the timings, etc. maybe.

It is.

I don't think this is entirely a Gigabyte initiative, i think like 5GB GTX 1060's and GTX 1070TI's this is nVidia trying to create new markets to shift more cards.
Probably mobile and OEM GPU's they thought they had a market for but because of Intel and to a much smaller extent AMD now don't.
AMD are preparing RX 560 > RX 570 level APU's while Intel are going two further and preparing 'literally' full fat RX 580 Level iGPU's.

The era of true high performance integrated graphics is about to start and with that expensive discrete graphics are going to find it hard and harder to find their way into OEM systems.

 

[Phixsator]

I suspect a lot of these will be bought by educational places and smaller businesses that use compute for R&D, etc. who'll find it hard to justify the costs of things like Tesla for their uses.

Even with the latest changes to the nvidia EULA? seems like nvidia wants to nip this in the butt.

 

[Rroff]

Even with the latest changes to the nvidia EULA? seems like nvidia wants to nip this in the butt.

Its pretty poor of nVidia but currently only applies to very specific use and doesn't cover things like university installations and small businesses, etc. its only intended and a bit poor at that to deter the use in high end installations.