I got an entire Prebuilt PC when POW ended from a miner. AMD 5950x, 64gb ram, 3090, 2tb SSD, all for $1700. This was 4 years ago when the 3090 was $1500 by itself, and with minor upgrades it's still going strong today.
It's wild to think that the system now is worth at least as much as I paid for it then if not much more than that. I saw a similar one going for $2500.
To advertise the maximum possible performance numbers, CPUs and GPUs massively shoot up the power draw for that final few percentage points. If you are worried about actual calculations/$, cutting back on the power will save your energy bill for practically no loss.
When I tested "ECO" mode on my AMD CPU, performance was ~97% of regular mode, and temperatures dropped 5-10C. I think ECO mode drops TDP from something like 100W->65W. Cheaper and cooler to run for basically no cost.
If you are bitcoin mining or selling GPU capacity, you are incredibly conscious of your energy bill, so it only makes sense to optimize the power draw.
Not true. A B200 "only" draws 1 kW. At 16¢ USD / kWh that's $1400 / year. When the hardware costs multiple tens of thousands you might be looking at a yearly electricity bill of ~3% of that. And that's before accounting for the datacenter itself.
The difference is that much of the hardware crypto was running on was dirt cheap in comparison. Add to that a lot of crypto was being run on discount gear in cobbled together setups. Some people were even stealing electricity which often involved installing large clusters of relatively cheap devices in places without proper cooling.
And you are only considering electricity bills for the GPU. Higher TDP also means more heat which means more cooling.
It's not really easy to make an off hand comment about costs. A 30-40% decreaae in electricity usage and heat output for a fleet of GPUs definitely makes a massive difference to your opex bottom line.
The datacenter will already have been built with an explicit cooling budget. Moving 1 watt of heat requires substantially less than 1 watt to do the work. So you've got a constant multiplier against something like a 9% annual failure rate and an order of magnitude difference in cost.
That just shows up as a constant factor, accounted for at build out. Consider if each watt dissipated required an additional watt. That's clearly an absurd overestimate yet it would "only" double power costs making the example $2800 / year. Underestimate the B200 at $30k USD and you've got 10.5 years of operation before you achieve parity as a fairly unrealistic worst case estimate. Now consider that at a 9% failure rate the average lifespan is only ~11 years. So electricity (both operation and cooling) is pretty much guaranteed to be less than half your total operating cost no matter how you slice it.
Most crypto mining on GPUs would use 100% of memory bandwidth, but only a fraction of the compute available. This is a consequence of ASIC resistance of their mining algorithms -- custom silicon can only offer a modest benefit over GPUs if the hard part is memory bandwidth.
It was clean, cheap, and is still going strong for daily gaming.
In its working life it was undervolted and probably cooled better than in my rig.