[Evshrug]

More like AEC's than DAC's... Analogue to electrical. A direct connection to the brain would neatly bypass the effects of ear shape and all that, and also neatly sidestep the challenge of creating holographic displays (3D, not limited to physical size), but... Call me old fashioned, but I feel a direct brain hookup is even weirder than other "future techs" like cloning.

 

[NamelessPFG]

Naw - we'll have neural probes and crap attached to our brain stems (with revolving radars attached to our skulls). In the 22nd Century, they will look back at us on Head-Fi and giggle and point. Our ears only do the hearing - our brains are our DACs really (whoa). Best to bypass the ears and interface wit da brain. So there.

I don't know about you, but all those cyberpunk examples of brains getting fried make me NOT want such implants!

 

[chicolom]

I'm still waiting on various PC parts to come in, so I put my unopened HD 7870 GPU on eBay to see what would happen, and I flipped it for a $50 profit! 

 
Normally I frown upon flipping things, but I feel no remorse flipping a card to a litecoin miner, which the buyer most likely is.  They're buying out all the AMD cards everywhere to put them in a basement to mine coins in GPU sweatshops.  Kind of sad, when there are gamers out there trying to get a gaming GPU to so they can use it to....game.
 
Time to look for a new GPU.  I'm thinking maybe a GTX 770? 

 

 

[SaLX]

Nice deal chico - and yes the 770 would be without question an excellent choice. I've got a GTX 670 and it still does the job big time, but the 770 (look at the GTX 680 for comparison) would be the card I'd go for if I was doing a build right now - basically it would be a decent step up in power over my 670. Maybe somebody could chip in about the new AMD R9 alternatives seeing as they're aggressively priced?

 

[chicolom]

Nice deal chico - and yes the 770 would be without question an excellent choice.

Maybe somebody could chip in about the new AMD R9 alternatives seeing as they're aggressively priced?

 
Not anymore, thanks to the litecoin mining explosion.  You'll notice the 280x are either all out of stock or are going for about ~$100 more than 770s now. 

 
AMD 7950s in particular are worth a bunch, as they seem to be the miner's favorite card.  If anyone here has a 7950, NOW IS THE TIME TO SELL.  Seriously, they're going for $400+ on eBay right now.  Sell it and get a free upgrade to a newer more powerful card.
 
Even vendors are selling these cards at above MSRP!
Newegg was selling 7950s for $150 during black friday, then they realized what was happening with all these litecoin miners and they upped their 7950 price to $450 the next week - and they still sold out!!

 

[Mad Lust Envy]

What is this mining?

 

[chicolom]

Basically, people buy a bunch of graphics cards and then just leave them turned on 24/7, running and calculating math problems, and they make money out of thin air from the process - or more accurately, they convert electricity into money. 
 
This is something that's been going on years, but thanks to recent media coverage/publicity it's increased exponentially because a bunch of new people heard about it and think it sounds like easy money.  So they're buying out all the AMD video cards in bulk to try and setup these "mining rigs" to try and get free money.
 
 
http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/1siltn/a_guide_to_what_the_heck_is_going_on/
 
 
 

Spoiler: Explosion

 

 

[Mad Lust Envy]

Oh... the things people do to beat the system and cheat their way into money.

I'll remain poor, oblivious, and stick with Nvidia. The 7970m that I had on 3 of my first M17x's were all faulty. First GTX680m worked perfectly.

 

[SaLX]

Fascinating article chico - wow $12 dollars a day per graphics card (though the value is going up). Not tempted but wow.. wonders will never cease.. I like the quote "Will we ever get our beloved 7950s back.....?"

 

[chicolom]

FWIR, for anyone just now getting into it it's already probably too late. 
 
The people who will make money are the ones who got in early on, before the coin price and difficulty skyrocketed.  The more GPUs that join, the more difficulty rises and the smaller the rewards.
 
 
Another article on the AMD shortages:
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2013/12/9/cryptocurrencies-are-causing-shortages-of-amd-radeon-gpus.aspx
 

Because of this fact, If you go online and try to buy an R9 280X or an R9 290 your options are severely limited.  We've spoken to some people involved with the retailers and some retailers themselves and we've been finding that most retailers simply have very little to no stock of cards. And this is not for having enough cards coming in, but rather that in some cases back orders are outstripping the incoming stock. If you head on over to Newegg, you can see that only 4 out of 17 models of the R9 280X are available for sale, the rest are completely sold out. In addition to that, only 2 of the 16 models of the R9 290X are available for sale as well. The story is the same with the R9 290 as well, with only two of the 7 models of the card available for sale.

We wanted to make sure that it wasn't that these cards were getting EOL'd or cut down in quantities, so we did a stock check with another retailer and verified our hypothesis. For the R9 290, they had 225 cards incoming with 121 back orders already being filled. The R9 290X was a much more drastic story with 290 cards shipping and 259 backorders being filled, effectively only leaving 30 cards in inventory, which will likely be snapped up immediately after they are shown as in stock. Even the R9 280X, which is effectively an HD 7970 refreshed into a new card has an insane amount of backorders with a quantity of 642 cards being shipped and 525 backorders being filled immediately.

Upon talking with one retailer, we heard them say that this is the best month they have ever had for GPU sales and it is only the 9th of December. Considering that many more cards will be shipped before the end of the month, I suspect that this could be the best month of GPU sales for AMD and most vendors and their retailers, ever.  We also spoke with a European retailer that stated that they had sold over 1,000 high-end AMD GPUs over the course of last week (starting with Cyber Monday) and that 65% of those sales were multi-GPU sales. They said that they suspect most of those sales were for LiteCoin.

As a result, this retailer and many retailers will likely be sold out of AMD high-end GPUs for the time coming and if you want one and see it is in stock, buy it. Because there is a strong likelihood that you won't see very many cards coming in stock until late December or early January. Sure, there will be some of the new non-reference cooler models coming out, but those are usually produced in lower quantities, especially in their first few runs. I suspect that between these developments and the PS4 and Xbox One selling very well, AMD is going to have an incredibly strong fourth quarter of 2013. One I don't think anyone would have suspected.

 
 
So for gamers, I think the logical option right now (and for the near future) is to go with an Nvidia card for gaming.  If you want an AMD card, you'll have to fight it out with these miners over stock and/or pay for the card at/or above MSRP.
 
And just a reminder that anyone here with an AMD GPU might want to consider selling it for a profit online.

 

[pox67]

  FWIR, for anyone just now getting into it it's already probably too late. 
 
The people who will make money are the ones who got in early on, before the coin price and difficulty skyrocketed.  The more GPUs that join, the more difficulty rises and the smaller the rewards.
 
 
So for gamers, I think the logical option right now (and for the near future) is to go with an Nvidia card for gaming.  If you want an AMD card, you'll have to fight it out with these miners over stock and/or pay for the card at/or above MSRP.
 
Crazy.

 
Yep, I mined a bunch of Litecoins and some others earlier in the year. Built a couple of computers with dual 7970's in them and let them go for 3 months. I ran them during the winter so that the heat from the computers was useful in heating the house. Once I had a little stockpile of coins I kept two watercooled 7970s for gaming and sold the other computer for a profit. Completely covered costs and have about $25000 in current market value of Litecoins + others. It was a fun experiment that paid off, I like all forms of computing so it was just an interesting project for me.

 

[chicolom]

   
 Completely covered costs and have about $25000 in current market value of Litecoins + others.

 
So are you going to "cash in" your coins for some usable currency (like USD)?  Or are you going to wait and see if the price of coins rises or falls. 
 
Seems a little risky to bet on it.

 

[pox67]

   
So are you going to "cash in" your coins for some usable currency (like USD)?  Or are you going to wait and see if the price of coins rises or falls. 
 
Seems a little risky to bet on it.

Haha, that is always the question.
After mining them up I sold enough to cover costs of electricity and the computers I bought. So now what I have is basically profit. When Litecoin hit $10 I cashed in 70 and bought a new mobile phone (Asus Fonepad Infinity - amazing phone + tablet combo). I don't regret doing that but Litecoins immediately went to $40. Now I am content to sit and watch what happens. I don't think the full potential of these coins as a payment system has been realised yet so I figure the price will rise for a while.

 

[SaLX]

Making money from literally nothing. Any one thing or commodity on this planet is worth exactly what you're prepared to pay for it; and in turn, exactly what some other person is prepared to pay for it. In this case, it's meaningless codes stashed in somebody's software 'box'. Good on you px67. Kind of shows up what real life stock markets are about, however they are based on material things.. but not any more by the looks of it.
 
Please spend your $25,000 on hookers, porn and drugs solely for an exciting finale. They'll never make a film about some (wealthy) nerd in a basement with a stack of dual AMD 7970's, not even with Val Kilmer.

 

[Evshrug]

I remember hearing about BitCoin mining a lot longer ago than "months and months," in fact long enough ago I don't remember who and in what location I was talking to them about it. At the time, I thought it must be an extension out from when you could "lease" your computer's processing cycles, when you would otherwise leave your computer idle, out to universities and institutions to help solve complex math equations, and they would pay you for "borrowing" the use of your machine. And then when AMD's 7xxx series cards came out last year, "Tom's Hardware" was including compute performance for litecoin mining use... so it's been around for a while.

However, what I gleaned from it overall was that you have to buy a lot of high-end cards and build several machines with them to generate enough coins to really make it time-efficient... Basically, it becomes like owning and supporting any other small business, and personally I'd just rather spend my time and make my money in other ways. To each their own though, and it takes all kinds to make the world go around.