The shortage was so severe that a few sources within the channel confirmed that it is impossible to buy any Radeon RX 580 or 570 cards. This has been going on since late May and has shown no signs of recovering. It was confirmed to Fudzilla that AMD was bringing back the production of Radeon RX 480 and 470 cards too, just to fill the demands as buyers were hungry for them too.
Big customers out of China and some other parts of Europe were buying millions of worth of mining capable graphics cards as Ethereum jumped all the way to $400. The Ethereum price in recent days dropped below $200 making the profits down by a half. Today it was trading for $190 while Bitcoin $2266.44 wasdown from $ 2800 at its maximum peak a month ago.
Fudzilla talked with a few crypto currency experts about Bitcoin and Ethereum / Litecoin just to get on top of things. If you look at the data, in case you can get the cards or mining hardware such as AntMiner in time, you might actually make some money. The Antminer S9-13.5TH/s that sells for $1099 without PSU will only be shipping between the 21st to the 30th September.
Still it is a very risky investment as currency jumps up and down with no signs of stabilization. It will usually take six to eight weeks to get the hardware and at that time, the price of the crypto currency could be anywhere from sky rocket to the basement bottom. By the time you get your cards, the Ethereum or Bitcoin may change the algorithm complexity just to cope with all the available computation power, making the investment risky, to say the least.
This still causes a major shortage of the Radeon 500 series cards and affects most of the Geforce 1060 3GB sales too. These cards sit in a nice price performance ratio and are very popular for mining too.
Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 580 8GD5 for example is available and in stock today for €379. A month ago, this card was selling for €275 dropping to 266.88 to be back at €300+.
If you are a gamer and you wanted to buy a card for gaming, this is a bad time to buy as prices are at an all time high. There are some indications that the supply situation might improve before the end of the summer in the western hemisphere and get to a normal level before September.
