The Ethereum Merge: A Game-Changing Event for Cryptocurrency and GPU Mining

The Ethereum Merge is a highly anticipated event that will switch Ethereum, the second most valuable cryptocurrency by market cap, from a proof of work model to a proof of stake model. This change will have significant implications for the vast majority of GPU mining that currently supports the network. The merge countdown timer can now be referenced, with less than 30 days to go, and many are wondering what happens to the GPUs that make up the current hash rate once the merge takes place. A good amount of miners have already pulled out since the hash rate hit its peak back in May, but once the merge occurs, these GPUs will no longer be able to mine, and the secondhand market is expected to see another massive influx of cards at cutthroat prices.

The Ethereum Merge: Timing and Progress

Developers confirm that final preparations for the merge are complete, with a confirmed date set for September 15th. However, it's worth noting that this date could shift by a few hours or days as network hash rates change. The Ethereum community is eagerly awaiting the merge, which promises to revolutionize the way cryptocurrency transactions are processed.

The End of GPU Mining on Ethereum

One cannot help but wonder what happens to the GPUs that currently make up the vast majority of the Ethereum network's hash rate once the merge takes place. These devices have been the backbone of GPU mining for years, and their sudden obsolescence will undoubtedly have significant consequences for the cryptocurrency market.

The Tech World: A Look at Some Recent Developments

In other news, tech enthusiasts and hard-working farmers alike can rejoice in the recent jailing of John Deere's control unit. The device, responsible for disabling tractors, was successfully jailbroken by a cybersecurity researcher known as Sick Codes on Twitter. This development is significant, as it highlights the ongoing struggle between tech companies like John Deere and their customers.

A closer look at the incident reveals that John Deere has attempted to prevent farmers from fixing their tractors using draconian DRM schemes and monopolistic practices. However, the recent jailbreak of the control unit marks a major victory for farmers who have been fighting against these restrictive measures.

Recalls and Hardware Failures

Recent news has also brought attention to some recalls and hardware failures in the world of PC hardware.

Asus recently issued a recall for its Rog Z690 Hero motherboard due to potential fire hazards. The issue was discovered after a capacitor installed in an incorrect orientation caused problems with the motherboard's performance.

A similar issue was reported back in December, when it was first discovered that certain laptops could crash when playing Janet Jackson's 1989 hit song "Rhythm Nation". Microsoft blogger Raymond Chen explains that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for 5400 rpm laptop hard drives, causing them to malfunction and crash.

The solution to this issue was eventually found in a custom filter that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback. This highlights the ongoing importance of testing and quality control in the world of PC hardware.

Conclusion

As summer continues to progress, tech enthusiasts can look forward to another week of news and developments from the world of cryptocurrency, GPU mining, and PC hardware. From the Ethereum Merge to recalls and hardware failures, there's always something new and exciting happening in the tech world.

If you liked this article, click that like button or leave a comment below. For more articles, merchandise, and exclusive content, be sure to check out my store at paulsHardware.net. Subscribing to my channel is always a good call too – thanks again everyone, and we'll see you next week!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome back to paul's tech news i'd like to welcome back to pulp sure joe's not gonna have any fun with this welcome back to paul's tech news i'd like to begin today with a hearty congratulations to all of you for making it through the dog days of summer 2022 which officially ended actually about 10 days ago according to the hellenistic astrologers out there leaving us with but one month of official summer remaining and leaving me with no alternative means of wedging in this stellar astronomical pun why so serious get it serious dog days of summer anyway for those wondering why i'm talking about stars and seasons instead of nuts and bolts tech news i'll remind you that the end of summer is not typically a time when a great number of new product launches happen and we've already been subsisting on a meager diet of leaks and rumors for several months but fear not the fall harvest is not far off and soon we will feast at a festival table laden with delicious new cpus and am5 motherboards from amd with an announcement coming august 29th intel has tantalizing raptor lake cpus on the way too that look like they'll hit some impressive clock speeds gpu prices are down and continuing to fall like a waterfall of sumptuous gravy and will even have some delectable side dishes with 10 gigabyte per second nvme ssds so let's just relax a bit and enjoy these final days of summer while we dream about the indulgences to come excellent today's video is brought to you by the new fx series of cases and cpu coolers from be quiet combining addressable rgb lighting with legendary build quality top tier performance and near silent operation the purebase 500 fx can fit up to a 360 millimeter all in one or tall air coolers while keeping things chilly thanks to airflow optimized top and front panels the pureloop 2 fx liquid cooler comes in three sizes and supports all modern mainstream cpus and the pure rock 2 fx air cooler can handle up to 150 watts tdp with style and ease be quiet's fx series products are suitable for any build in need of a functional and tasteful rgb upgrade so click the sponsor link in the video description for more let's start off with some new leaks about intel's raptor lake cpus the 13th gen core models led by the flagship i9 13 900k early benchmarks are already out there and more than a few have been published by extreme player who posts content over on the chinese social media site billy billy most recently on friday he showed off his full but unofficial list of 13th gen core cpus from the 13900k and kf all the way down to the 13 100. tdp core counts cash igp info and base clocks are all there but turbo speeds are notably absent either unavailable or perhaps too extreme to reveal for now even for the most extreme players e-core counts are up almost across the board while base clock speeds are actually down a bit though we do expect turbo speeds to go beyond what 12th gen alder lake was able to hit which of these cpus we'll actually see go up for sale before the end of the year is out also remains a mystery but most websites are speculating that it will likely be the 13 900k 13700k and 13600k because that's what intel did last year extreme player also showed off what appears to be a core i9 13 900 kf qualification sample or qs model cpu on thursday running at a very nice 6.1 gigahertz clock speed no less although it should be noted that he was using a liquid loop chiller to keep temps down which is outside the range of what most home users will be set up with tom's hardware showed his leaked air-cooled 13 900k results from last month next to the numbers from thursday revealing a nice uplift just shy of 18 on the cpu z score going from 16 600 to 19 19550 at 6.1 gigahertz but he can only get cinebench stable at 5.8 gigahertz gaining about 14.5 percent to hit 42 790. a stock ryzen 9 59.50 x will usually get about 26 to 27 000 points in this test by comparison but fortunately for amd they won't have to rely on their flagship 5950x for much longer as it is getting ready to pass the baton to the new top chip from the ryzen 7000 series the 7950x we will likely be finding out more about the 16 core 7950x as well as hopefully other cpus like the 12 core 7900x the eight core 7800x and or 7700x and the six core 7600x on monday august 29th at 7 00 pm eastern time as amd will be hosting a live streamed event titled together we advance underscore pcs to unveil next generation pc products and to let us know definitively whether or not we're supposed to pronounce the underscore there and since that event is now just eight days away and the actual launch is rumored to be september 15th or maybe it has been moved to september 27th which would be the same day as intel's raptor lake unveil as i discussed in my anchoring video earlier this week we now have more images surfacing of what very much appear to be real life am5 cpus like this ryzen 7 7700x chip posted to the anandtech forums this one has a laser engraved amd ryzen logo and skew that aligns with previous rumors and this d marking down here at the bottom suggests it is a pre-retail version or a review sample this has spawned even more arguments over the heat spreader design and whether it kind of looks like a cool spider or something with its eight arms reaching out towards the edges of the substrate beneath or if it was engineered by satan herself to trap as much errant thermal paste as possible in each of those nooks and crannies around the edge with each application other twitter leaker harukase5719 who is way more legit because they follow me posted this pic of an engineering sample am5 cpu with thermal paste before and after to ease our fears just a bit and then they followed up friday to solve the mystery of who leaked that 7700x photo was it asus gigabyte msi asrock no it was lenovo lenovo you should have known this is the biggest scandal since superfish of course what's the point of getting yourself a new am5 rig or an intel alder lake or raptor lake setup for that matter if you don't fully take advantage of the latest specs they offer like pci express 5.0 ssd manufacturers are hoping that's your line of thinking and more of them are coming out with legitimate gen 5 drives like corsair who published this performance chart for their upcoming mp700 pcie gen 5 nvme m.2 ssd showing off 10 000 megabytes per second sequential read speeds or 10 gigabytes per second with writes falling in uh just about 10 slower at 9 000 megabytes per second or close to it this chart isn't exactly pinpoint accurate oh i guess it's 9500 megabytes per second sequential write speeds according to the article's texts no additional info on capacities or release date was shared but it will likely use the next gen physon controller and is am5 compatible which is to be expected gigabyte also pushed out a press release friday about their aorus gen 5 10000 ssd which as the name implies is a pcie gen 5 ssd that also hits 10 000 megabytes per second read speeds and also uses a faison controller maybe the same one it is at least named here it is the faison ps5026-e26 controller as well as the nand which is 3d tlc flash supplemented by lp ddr4 cache it will come in capacities from 1 to 4 terabytes and can even push 12.4 gigabytes per second reads and 10 gigabytes per second rates under some circumstances like this crystal disk mark benchmark i'll take four of them gigabyte and throw in a few gpus too while you're at it they're cheap these days right cheap and getting cheaper if reports from chinese websites zoll.com and my drivers are accurate who cite a shocking drop in gpu purchases by cryptocurrency miners recently that no one like me or a bunch of other people could ever have predicted would happen the removal of that group of potential buyers has left nvidia and amd with no choice but to rely on actual pc gamers to buy the gpus that they make for pc gaming and that group is feeling a bit dejected and unenthusiastic about jumping back into the retail market after being left out in the cold for well nigh on two years while team red and team green party it up inside with their new friends the crypto miners who will be around forever because their loyalty knows no bounds flush with profits nvidia ordered a bunch more gpu chips to sell at grossly engorged prices but suddenly the crypto miners are nowhere to be found nvidia must now deal with actual market conditions and price their cards competitively oh no and don't look now but amd is in the same boat with a new generation of gpus just months away and a big surplus of previous gen cards to move before then and so 6700 xts can now be found for well below 400 rx 6600s are going for 260 and even 3080 ti's are going for 850 bucks when their msrp is 1200 so should you jump on those deals right now i'd say no and not just because it's kind of nice to watch them race to the bottom of the pricing barrel after so long but because the worst or best might be yet to come the ethereum merge which i've covered many times because it will switch ethereum the second most valuable cryptocurrency by market cap and the cause of the vast majority of gpu mining from a proof of work model to proof of stake which basically means you won't be able to mine it with gpus anymore and look just just look at the stories from this week ethereum merge progress is 96 complete developers confirm final date and that date is now september 15th although it could shift a bit as network hash rates change but likely only by a few hours or maybe days merge countdown timers can now be referenced and so with less than 30 days to go one has to wonder what happens to the gpus that currently make up the hash rate that is still on the ethereum network and you can see that a good amount of miners have already pulled out since the hash rate hit its peak back in may but once the merge happens all of these gpus that make up all of this current hash rate simply won't be able to mine anymore so i'm willing to bet that the secondhand market which has already been at the forefront of falling gpu prices will see another massive influx of cards in the next few weeks and likely at cut throat prices i hope it will be glorious speaking of things that are glorious tech briefs are upon us and they sure do feel comfortable if there's one thing the tech community and your average hard-working farmer can agree upon these days it's that john deere sucks with their draconian tractor drm schemes and monopolistic practices so it was with much joy that defcon 30 attendees watched the cyber security researcher known as sick codes on twitter jailbreak one of john deere's control units the device that's responsible for disabling the tractor the tractor that farmers might have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for until maybe something went wrong and they had to wait for an official john deere technician to be sent out to perform what are often rudimentary repairs there are tons of juicy details in the blog post linked in the description including all the ridiculous ways john deere has tried to prevent the people who buy their tractors from fixing them so check it out and take heart because farmers are reclaiming their tractors whether the overlords at john deere like it or not now you might have heard the news just recently that asus had to recall its rog z690 hero motherboard due to potential fire and burn hazards or maybe you heard about it less recently back in december when it was first reported although this matter was sorted out many months ago the united states consumer product safety commission released a statement about it just on thursday causing quite a few news articles to pop up because fire bad and fear of fire gets clicks the actual issue was a capacitor that was installed in an incorrect orientation asus already issued the recall back in december relatively few units were affected and they've confirmed that all the stock in the wild now is 100 free of the issue on the off chance that this is the first time you're hearing of this though and if you bought an rog z690 motherboard back in late 2021 you'll probably want to double check that your motherboard does not have this model number because if it does you might be affected but you can still contact asus for a replacement speaking of pc hardware fails here's one last one that you might not have heard of since it goes back to the windows xp days microsoft blogger raymond chen posted a story tuesday about a little known conflict between laptop computers and janet jackson's 1989 hit song rhythm nation chen says a major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the song would cause windows laptop pcs to crash even if the song was just playing on another computer nearby the explanation was eventually discovered the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that those laptops used says chen causing the drive to malfunction and the system to crash so to solve it they added a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback so if you'd still like to be a part of the rhythm nation just make sure your laptop runs on an ssd so there you have it guys summer continues to progress and with it comes your weekly dose of tech news and if you liked it click that like button or leave me a comment down below while you're down there all the articles i talked about today are linked in the description if you're interested you can also check out my store at paul's hardware dot net for high quality merchandise t-shirts including this excellent new design hoodies beer sets and more subscribing to my channel is always a good call too thanks again everyone and we'll see you next weekwelcome back to paul's tech news i'd like to welcome back to pulp sure joe's not gonna have any fun with this welcome back to paul's tech news i'd like to begin today with a hearty congratulations to all of you for making it through the dog days of summer 2022 which officially ended actually about 10 days ago according to the hellenistic astrologers out there leaving us with but one month of official summer remaining and leaving me with no alternative means of wedging in this stellar astronomical pun why so serious get it serious dog days of summer anyway for those wondering why i'm talking about stars and seasons instead of nuts and bolts tech news i'll remind you that the end of summer is not typically a time when a great number of new product launches happen and we've already been subsisting on a meager diet of leaks and rumors for several months but fear not the fall harvest is not far off and soon we will feast at a festival table laden with delicious new cpus and am5 motherboards from amd with an announcement coming august 29th intel has tantalizing raptor lake cpus on the way too that look like they'll hit some impressive clock speeds gpu prices are down and continuing to fall like a waterfall of sumptuous gravy and will even have some delectable side dishes with 10 gigabyte per second nvme ssds so let's just relax a bit and enjoy these final days of summer while we dream about the indulgences to come excellent today's video is brought to you by the new fx series of cases and cpu coolers from be quiet combining addressable rgb lighting with legendary build quality top tier performance and near silent operation the purebase 500 fx can fit up to a 360 millimeter all in one or tall air coolers while keeping things chilly thanks to airflow optimized top and front panels the pureloop 2 fx liquid cooler comes in three sizes and supports all modern mainstream cpus and the pure rock 2 fx air cooler can handle up to 150 watts tdp with style and ease be quiet's fx series products are suitable for any build in need of a functional and tasteful rgb upgrade so click the sponsor link in the video description for more let's start off with some new leaks about intel's raptor lake cpus the 13th gen core models led by the flagship i9 13 900k early benchmarks are already out there and more than a few have been published by extreme player who posts content over on the chinese social media site billy billy most recently on friday he showed off his full but unofficial list of 13th gen core cpus from the 13900k and kf all the way down to the 13 100. tdp core counts cash igp info and base clocks are all there but turbo speeds are notably absent either unavailable or perhaps too extreme to reveal for now even for the most extreme players e-core counts are up almost across the board while base clock speeds are actually down a bit though we do expect turbo speeds to go beyond what 12th gen alder lake was able to hit which of these cpus we'll actually see go up for sale before the end of the year is out also remains a mystery but most websites are speculating that it will likely be the 13 900k 13700k and 13600k because that's what intel did last year extreme player also showed off what appears to be a core i9 13 900 kf qualification sample or qs model cpu on thursday running at a very nice 6.1 gigahertz clock speed no less although it should be noted that he was using a liquid loop chiller to keep temps down which is outside the range of what most home users will be set up with tom's hardware showed his leaked air-cooled 13 900k results from last month next to the numbers from thursday revealing a nice uplift just shy of 18 on the cpu z score going from 16 600 to 19 19550 at 6.1 gigahertz but he can only get cinebench stable at 5.8 gigahertz gaining about 14.5 percent to hit 42 790. a stock ryzen 9 59.50 x will usually get about 26 to 27 000 points in this test by comparison but fortunately for amd they won't have to rely on their flagship 5950x for much longer as it is getting ready to pass the baton to the new top chip from the ryzen 7000 series the 7950x we will likely be finding out more about the 16 core 7950x as well as hopefully other cpus like the 12 core 7900x the eight core 7800x and or 7700x and the six core 7600x on monday august 29th at 7 00 pm eastern time as amd will be hosting a live streamed event titled together we advance underscore pcs to unveil next generation pc products and to let us know definitively whether or not we're supposed to pronounce the underscore there and since that event is now just eight days away and the actual launch is rumored to be september 15th or maybe it has been moved to september 27th which would be the same day as intel's raptor lake unveil as i discussed in my anchoring video earlier this week we now have more images surfacing of what very much appear to be real life am5 cpus like this ryzen 7 7700x chip posted to the anandtech forums this one has a laser engraved amd ryzen logo and skew that aligns with previous rumors and this d marking down here at the bottom suggests it is a pre-retail version or a review sample this has spawned even more arguments over the heat spreader design and whether it kind of looks like a cool spider or something with its eight arms reaching out towards the edges of the substrate beneath or if it was engineered by satan herself to trap as much errant thermal paste as possible in each of those nooks and crannies around the edge with each application other twitter leaker harukase5719 who is way more legit because they follow me posted this pic of an engineering sample am5 cpu with thermal paste before and after to ease our fears just a bit and then they followed up friday to solve the mystery of who leaked that 7700x photo was it asus gigabyte msi asrock no it was lenovo lenovo you should have known this is the biggest scandal since superfish of course what's the point of getting yourself a new am5 rig or an intel alder lake or raptor lake setup for that matter if you don't fully take advantage of the latest specs they offer like pci express 5.0 ssd manufacturers are hoping that's your line of thinking and more of them are coming out with legitimate gen 5 drives like corsair who published this performance chart for their upcoming mp700 pcie gen 5 nvme m.2 ssd showing off 10 000 megabytes per second sequential read speeds or 10 gigabytes per second with writes falling in uh just about 10 slower at 9 000 megabytes per second or close to it this chart isn't exactly pinpoint accurate oh i guess it's 9500 megabytes per second sequential write speeds according to the article's texts no additional info on capacities or release date was shared but it will likely use the next gen physon controller and is am5 compatible which is to be expected gigabyte also pushed out a press release friday about their aorus gen 5 10000 ssd which as the name implies is a pcie gen 5 ssd that also hits 10 000 megabytes per second read speeds and also uses a faison controller maybe the same one it is at least named here it is the faison ps5026-e26 controller as well as the nand which is 3d tlc flash supplemented by lp ddr4 cache it will come in capacities from 1 to 4 terabytes and can even push 12.4 gigabytes per second reads and 10 gigabytes per second rates under some circumstances like this crystal disk mark benchmark i'll take four of them gigabyte and throw in a few gpus too while you're at it they're cheap these days right cheap and getting cheaper if reports from chinese websites zoll.com and my drivers are accurate who cite a shocking drop in gpu purchases by cryptocurrency miners recently that no one like me or a bunch of other people could ever have predicted would happen the removal of that group of potential buyers has left nvidia and amd with no choice but to rely on actual pc gamers to buy the gpus that they make for pc gaming and that group is feeling a bit dejected and unenthusiastic about jumping back into the retail market after being left out in the cold for well nigh on two years while team red and team green party it up inside with their new friends the crypto miners who will be around forever because their loyalty knows no bounds flush with profits nvidia ordered a bunch more gpu chips to sell at grossly engorged prices but suddenly the crypto miners are nowhere to be found nvidia must now deal with actual market conditions and price their cards competitively oh no and don't look now but amd is in the same boat with a new generation of gpus just months away and a big surplus of previous gen cards to move before then and so 6700 xts can now be found for well below 400 rx 6600s are going for 260 and even 3080 ti's are going for 850 bucks when their msrp is 1200 so should you jump on those deals right now i'd say no and not just because it's kind of nice to watch them race to the bottom of the pricing barrel after so long but because the worst or best might be yet to come the ethereum merge which i've covered many times because it will switch ethereum the second most valuable cryptocurrency by market cap and the cause of the vast majority of gpu mining from a proof of work model to proof of stake which basically means you won't be able to mine it with gpus anymore and look just just look at the stories from this week ethereum merge progress is 96 complete developers confirm final date and that date is now september 15th although it could shift a bit as network hash rates change but likely only by a few hours or maybe days merge countdown timers can now be referenced and so with less than 30 days to go one has to wonder what happens to the gpus that currently make up the hash rate that is still on the ethereum network and you can see that a good amount of miners have already pulled out since the hash rate hit its peak back in may but once the merge happens all of these gpus that make up all of this current hash rate simply won't be able to mine anymore so i'm willing to bet that the secondhand market which has already been at the forefront of falling gpu prices will see another massive influx of cards in the next few weeks and likely at cut throat prices i hope it will be glorious speaking of things that are glorious tech briefs are upon us and they sure do feel comfortable if there's one thing the tech community and your average hard-working farmer can agree upon these days it's that john deere sucks with their draconian tractor drm schemes and monopolistic practices so it was with much joy that defcon 30 attendees watched the cyber security researcher known as sick codes on twitter jailbreak one of john deere's control units the device that's responsible for disabling the tractor the tractor that farmers might have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for until maybe something went wrong and they had to wait for an official john deere technician to be sent out to perform what are often rudimentary repairs there are tons of juicy details in the blog post linked in the description including all the ridiculous ways john deere has tried to prevent the people who buy their tractors from fixing them so check it out and take heart because farmers are reclaiming their tractors whether the overlords at john deere like it or not now you might have heard the news just recently that asus had to recall its rog z690 hero motherboard due to potential fire and burn hazards or maybe you heard about it less recently back in december when it was first reported although this matter was sorted out many months ago the united states consumer product safety commission released a statement about it just on thursday causing quite a few news articles to pop up because fire bad and fear of fire gets clicks the actual issue was a capacitor that was installed in an incorrect orientation asus already issued the recall back in december relatively few units were affected and they've confirmed that all the stock in the wild now is 100 free of the issue on the off chance that this is the first time you're hearing of this though and if you bought an rog z690 motherboard back in late 2021 you'll probably want to double check that your motherboard does not have this model number because if it does you might be affected but you can still contact asus for a replacement speaking of pc hardware fails here's one last one that you might not have heard of since it goes back to the windows xp days microsoft blogger raymond chen posted a story tuesday about a little known conflict between laptop computers and janet jackson's 1989 hit song rhythm nation chen says a major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the song would cause windows laptop pcs to crash even if the song was just playing on another computer nearby the explanation was eventually discovered the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that those laptops used says chen causing the drive to malfunction and the system to crash so to solve it they added a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback so if you'd still like to be a part of the rhythm nation just make sure your laptop runs on an ssd so there you have it guys summer continues to progress and with it comes your weekly dose of tech news and if you liked it click that like button or leave me a comment down below while you're down there all the articles i talked about today are linked in the description if you're interested you can also check out my store at paul's hardware dot net for high quality merchandise t-shirts including this excellent new design hoodies beer sets and more subscribing to my channel is always a good call too thanks again everyone and we'll see you next week\n"