Shortage of AMD Radeon RX 500 Series of GPUs on the Market

28 May
2017

With the switch from the RX 400 to the new RX 500 series (even if there is not much difference in hardware), AMD started having issues with availability. Older GPUs have been pretty much sold out where there were some left and the newer 570/580 models are pretty much out of stock everywhere. If there are some units left they are with an inflated price tag, because the people selling them want to make some extra bucks from the lack of availability and high demand. It is not known how long this lack of video cards will continue, but things were slowly progressing towards this negative outcome the whole month.

We are pretty sure that one of the reasons is mining and the recent peak of the price and profitability of Ethereum that inevitably leads to more and more new miners and mining rigs getting built. It seems however that AMD was really not ready for an increased demand after the release of the RX 500 series, even though RX 400 GPUs were already selling a lot. It may take a couple of weeks for things to get back to normal, unless the craze continues and unless AMD is actually having trouble making enough GPUs at the moment to cover the demand. Maybe the fact that the company is preparing for the release of their newer higher-end Vega solutions has something to do with the problem as well.

Miners are already looking at the alternatives of using Nvidia GPUs that are available plenty on the market, because they are not as good deal for Ethereum mining like the AMD cards in terms of price/performance. If you however take out the Ethash algorithm (Dagger-Hashimoto) out of the equation Nvidia’s Pascal GPUs are actually pretty good in terms of performance/power usage ratio… just not as good in memory intensive algorithms where GPU power is not required as much. Mining aside, gamers already have no other choice but to go for Nvidia if they are currently in the market for a new video card with AMD GPUs being out of stock.

The people that were mining a couple of years back during the Litecoin craze will most likely remember a similar situation where things got out of control for a while with the exchange rate of LTC exploding. This was only temporary as everyone was rushing to get into mining the top altcoin back then and then the price went down and things started to get back to normal. There are no guarantees that the same situation will happen again though, but don’t forget that we may be heading for a POW to POS switch for Ethereum by the end of the year…






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6 Responses to Shortage of AMD Radeon RX 500 Series of GPUs on the Market

Robert

May 29th, 2017 at 12:40

You can still buy RX570/580 cards in Australia :) The distributors are saying everything will be back to normal by mid July. Stock is arriving in Europe on 6/6/2017. Wholesalers have orders for 100-500/customer so I don’t know how long this shipment will last. In Europe there is no stock of 1000W power supplies.

Bensam123

May 29th, 2017 at 19:13

Going to disagree with the Nvidia recommendation. Nvidia hasn’t been worth buying since Equihash boom. Nvidia hashrate is now very bloated. Unless you’re insanely good at hunting for niche coins. Those are few and far inbetween where AMD is mining mainstream easy to access coins. Niche coins are also very easily saturated. You’re going to be stuck mining Equihash, a 1070 nets $4.37 in revenue right now. Mining with a 480/580 gets you roughly $5.64 in revenue on Eth+SIA. They both use about the same amount of power.

While it’s neat that geeks try to look for the little niche, there isn’t one for Nvidia unless a new big coin comes along. Looking at things from a $/revenue standpoint per card. It’s worth paying more then $400 for a 480/580, more then the price of a 1070. Comparatively Nvidia has either been over priced or under performs. There is no reason to buy Nvidia at all.

Ottavio

May 31st, 2017 at 15:13

Here in Italy 470 are still available for 200€, 480 for 260€, 570 for 220€ and 580 for 240€. Going to build a new rig I don’t know which one to buy. Any suggestion?

Sylv88

May 31st, 2017 at 23:15

@ottavio; go for the 480.. 470 is good aswell.. while you’re at it order 5 cards for me too ;-)

aBTC

June 2nd, 2017 at 12:31

Since everything has gone (rx 470, 480, 570, 580) would anyone suggest rx 460 or rx 550? I know that hashrate is low (10-11 mh/s) but price is also low (100 EUR)

@Ottavio where in italy can I buy RX’s? Online?

Robert

June 5th, 2017 at 09:38

RX 560 run at 15.5MHs and use around 50-60w, basically they are a RX 470 cut in half.

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