Why this year’s insane graphics-card price surge might be over

Enlarge / Radeon graphics card price data (left axis) from PC Part Picker. Ether price data (right axis) from Etherscan.io. (credit: Timothy B. Lee / Ars Technica)

The massive computing power of high-end consumer graphics cards make them ideal for mining Ethereum and a number of lesser-known cryptocurrencies. (Bitcoin's simpler mining algorithm long ago came to be dominated by custom ASICs, making GPU-based bitcoin mining unprofitable.) As a result, the cryptocurrency boom that began last year led to a boom in demand for graphics cards.

Prices soared last summer, then soared even more in early 2018. By February, the going rate for high-end graphics cards like the Radeon RX 570 and RX 580 was more than double what it had been nine months earlier.

But now the graphics-card boom seems to be coming to an end.

Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments