Posts Tagged ‘Radeon not available’

AMD GPU Shortages May Continue Longer Than Expected

5, Jun 2017

We are hearing information from different sources that AMD may have more serious issues with supplying enough of its Radeon RX 500 series of GPUs on the market for the next couple of months. It is not all about the increased demand from crypto miners as it seems that that the company may be experiencing some other issues that are causing it to not be able to produce enough GPUs to cover the demand. Looking at Ethereum’s hashrate and difficulty data however does not yet show a significant slowdown in growth, but the reason for that could easily be the move of existing mining power from other crypto coins to ETH.

With AMD GPUs hard to get for a while now miners are looking for alternatives that are good for Ethereum mining and while Nvidia GPUs are generally more expensive, there are some that are interesting for ETH mining. We are talking about the GTX 1070 that can do 25 MHS stock and 30 MHS or even a bit more after some memory overclocking and it can do it with a reduced TDP. As a result some miners have started looking at GTX 1070 as a solution to use for new mining rigs, again it might be more expensive, but with the high profitability mining now with a more expensive GPU than waiting to possibly secure some cheaper AMD cards in some days or even weeks…

Other more powerful GPUs from Nvidia are not so great for mining Ethereum due to the use of GDDR5X video memory instead of GDDR5 that is found on the GTX 1070. The GDDR5X memory is faster in terms of clock speed and offers more bandwidth, but apparently uses less aggressive timings and as a result is not much faster than the “slower” GDDR5 memory. As a result if you are looking at GTX 1080 or GTX 1080 Ti for Ethereum mining their price/performance ratio is really not attractive at all as far as Ethereum mining goes. Nvidia on the other hand is faster on ZEC and many other algorithms, but then again people are currently crazy about ETH. So do your math and think about it and don’t overthrow the GTX 1070 as a good option for Ethereum mining.

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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