The medium power cards will only work for people with really cheap electricity,mostly in Europe the price of energy is on a constant increase because of the war in Ukraine which has hyper inflated the prices.It would be difficult for such cards to offer good returns for miners who will buy them.The difficulty of Eth is not decreasing it is staying constant in the best case despite the price of Ethereum falling so I don't see any valid point to buy those cards unless you have really cheap electricity.
Even at a 7¢ power rate and video cards available at half of MSRP,
it will take 3+ years to reach payback if no other GPU coin saves the day. We would be stuck earning $0.40-0.50/day of profit on a $450 video card (including system parts). That is a 20-40% return per year, which isn't bad and is probably better than ASIC mining, but is nowhere near the 100-300% return we have seen over the past 5 years. The trend seems to be PoS coins getting the highest valuations these days. I expect PoW GPU coins to stagnate in market cap ranking, which means profit will stagnate. RVN/FLUX/etc. will probably keep throwing off ASICs, not that ASIC companies will even want to make them in a bear market.
Would I be happy with a 20-40% return? Yes, because there's the chance that a PoW coin can become big again and I could get a 200-500% return; just like I did in 2019-2021 with a GTX 1060 rig. No other investment is as good for me.
peak bear market should be at least 5-6 years ROI (3 years is still doable, RMA is 3 years), miners will see no point in owning these pieces of "trash money printers" LOL
at 5-6 years your card is not RMA-able and you haven't ROI'd yet..LMAO! --->peak bear market, peak pain.
then after a few monthly "green candles" it is back to 3 year ROI and then 1 year ROI..then retards panic buys the shit out of GPUs again hehe.
here is my take.
you would not want to have "no GPU farm" when the next..
1. big thing
2. pump and dump
3. bull run
...happens.
Lol I still want me some 580s graphic cards with 8GB memory, till date people are still buying this gpu for mining ETH and its been like 6 years already that this card have been here, oh I remember 2016/2017 a rx580 was on of the best for crypto mining at the time, anyway I believe something new will come up, its only a matter of time.