There’s a GTX 1080 Ti-lite on its way and it’s just for cryptocurrency miners… gamers despair

Inno3D P102-100

Yay, there’s a new graphics card about to hit the market. Boo, it’s not an Nvidia Volta gaming card. The new P102-100 from Inno3D is a Crypto-Mining Accelerator that’s going to have zero resale value on the second-hand gaming market if there’s a crypto crash.

Check out our pick of the best graphics cards you can buy today.

The new P102-100 GPU is a cut-down version of the graphics silicon Nvidia primed their GTX 1080 Ti with this time last year. It’s sporting fewer CUDA cores, and less than half of the GDDR5X memory it’s bigger sibling arrived with, even though the VRAM is running at the same speed.

Where the GTX 1080 Ti has 3,584 CUDA cores and 11GB GDDR5X, the P102-100 has only 3,200 CUDA cores and 5GB GDDR5X.

But you’re not going to see this card popping up on ebay if the arse drops out of the cryptocurrency market because it’s simply a bare PCB with a twin-fan cooler and no outputs. The damn thing doesn’t even have a bracket and still costs some $800. Though you might end up getting some sort of fixin’ in the box I guess.

And look at that cooler, it’s the same one as on the gorgeous Zotac GTX 1080 Ti mini. We love that card… it’s so cute. Since they’re both from the samePC Partner factoryit wouldn’t be surprising to see a Zotac version hitting the market too.

Zotac GTX 1080 Ti mini

It’s all quite depressing really. There are so few gaming cards on the market because crypto-miners are buying them all up, that pushes up the prices of whatever’s left, leaving us gamers struggling to find any hope of an upgrade. Then, even when stock is light, miners are getting more cards made specifically for them which we couldn’t possibly use in a gaming rig even if they were available to us.

This is my issue with the notion of AMD and Nvidia creating mining GPU architectures; it’s not going to help gamers. They’re probably not going to create a whole bunch of mining chips in higher volumes than they do for their gaming cards, so all the mining GPUs will sell out and they’ll still come for our gaming cards when they inevitably do.

Gamers will then have less opportunity to buy a graphics card, not more. Please, someone tell me how wrong I am in the comments, I need cheering up.