Graphics cards come back down

Timothy B. Lee, data from PC Part Picker.

Good news for gamers! Thanks to a dampening of speculation activity on cryptocurrencies, the price of graphics cards (which are used massively for mining) is coming back down from its stratospheric levels. The Radeon RX 570, a popular mid-range graphics card, had gone from under US$200 in April 2017 to over US$450 in February 2018. Now, it sits at US$350, which is still expensive, but already US$100 less than its peak, and the prices are still dropping. Similarly, the RX 580 went from US$230 to US$330 through US$540. Nvidia’s GeForce has followed the same pattern. The GTX 1080 floated down to US$600 after a US$800 high in February. In fact, the price of graphics cards is clearly correlated to the value of the ether (of the Ethereum platform). And as the ether is trending downward, so should the price of graphics cards. Ether is the second-most popular cryptocurrency after bitcoin, but worth far less. Bitcoin mining is no longer cost-effective with graphics cards since it has been taken over by faster, more energy-efficient ASICs. Over the last year, the value of graphics cards has effectively been pegged to the value of ether.

⇨ Ars Technica, “Declining cryptocurrency prices are making graphics cards affordable again.”