Something happened. 5870 cards on ebay.

[Wumpus]

I still see 5850's for 130 NIB at loacal retailers... (after MIR but still)

bitcoins are for sure the reason why the price of cypress went way back up. not too long ago 200 bucks was the going price for a 5870...

[Sparky]

5870's are pretty much all sold out here in retail shops. strange, not long ago everyone was selling them

I'm thinking old stock too, the 6000 series is the current gen so I don't think they would keep making too many more 5000 series cards.

[CedricFP]

No fun?

That's a good answer.

[jspace]

Why the craze with 5870s for Bitcoin? Are the 6000s really that much slower?

[don_xvi]

The conventional wisdom out there is that the 5870 is the best thing out there, but they're scarce. The 6000 series was rebalanced to make it work more efficiently as a graphics rendering engine, but not quite as good at crunching.

Of course, the whole point of this thread is that all of a sudden the early-bailers are selling equipment and the prices are going down.

I think we're about a day or two from another difficulty increase, it'll wind up balancing out at some point. The market price of a BTC is actually what will determine the profitability of continued mining!

[ggdh]

I think we're about a day or two from another difficulty increase

It happened half an hour ago

I am waiting for Mt.Gox to go back online - it should affect the price (finally).

[Tom128]

Why the craze with 5870s for Bitcoin? Are the 6000s really that much slower?

It's all about shader count, and how much it costs to get the shaders. The 5000's are organized less efficiently, their shaders are grouped in blocks of 5 instead of 4. That 5th shader often went unused/underused. They tweaked the organization of the shaders in the 6000 series to be more powerful, however a side effect is they are grouped in 4s and thus less shaders total. In bitcoin mining, the grouping does not matter, just the number of individual shaders, all of which are used in parallel.

5870 - 1600 shaders => There is no HD6000 series with this many shaders and you have to buy an expensive 6970 to get close
5850 - 1440 shaders
5830 - 1120 shaders => requires a $200 6870 to match it, which is why the $109 5830's vanished so fast.

[Rotaryloop]

i have 2 5870s, one is a asus v2 and a dell v1. im not using and there sitting on my desk for 3 months lol,

yes dell made 5870s lol, its rock solid, the board is thicker

[ggdh]

Bother to say your price?

[Rotaryloop]

i dunno, maybe like $300, ill do $250 if someone buys both. ill even put it on ebay for both cards if want to feel safer or just come pick them up