At one point, people used Graphic Cards (or, more specifically their GPUs) to mine Bitcoins. Over the last couple years, dedicated ASICs eliminated graphic cards, to the point where (according to eBay) - a $30 USB dongle [1] @ 1.6GH/s is more efficient than any graphic card [2] which top up around 1GHs/ at the high end.
Given that a lot of graphics cards were purchased for the sole purpose of mining bitcoins - I'm wondering if there is a huge surplus of cheap graphic cards out there now?
Strangely enough - eBay still shows graphic cards that were popular for mining, like the ATI Radeon 5970, still selling for around $300. [3]
I'm guessing that's evidence that the graphic card market wasn't wildly impacted by bitcoin mining?
People still use GPUs for mining scrypt-based coins (LiteCoin, DogeCoin, etc), though ASICs for those started hitting the market recently and profitability has slumped with bitcoin prices and difficulty increases.
In January I was looking to buy AMD graphics card(s) for numerical work using OpenCL. That time (roughly) corresponded to the peak in Litecoin prices. The best card - 7990 was generally sold out, and was going for about £600 on ebay.
Since then, Litecoin has dropped massively in value [1], and I am seeing sellers offloading eg "16 GPU cards + mining rig" on ebay. 7990 cards are now selling at around £300.
There might be other factors at play - eg the newer (and slightly better) R9 290X, or the anticipated arrival of dedicated Litecoin miners [2] - but mainly I think it is the price drop.
Given that a lot of graphics cards were purchased for the sole purpose of mining bitcoins - I'm wondering if there is a huge surplus of cheap graphic cards out there now?
Strangely enough - eBay still shows graphic cards that were popular for mining, like the ATI Radeon 5970, still selling for around $300. [3]
I'm guessing that's evidence that the graphic card market wasn't wildly impacted by bitcoin mining?
[1] http://www.ebay.com/itm/Brand-new-AntMiner-U1-USB-Bitcoin-Mi...
[2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison#Graphi....
[3] http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_odkw=AMD+5970&LH_Sold=1&_osa...