Radeon, GeForce video cards remain hard to find due to cryptocurrency

For a brief moment earlier this week, PC gamers looking to upgrade their rigs with the latest video cards from AMD or Nvidia felt some hope. The bitcoin-like cryptocurrency Ethereum that is driving up demand for many of those GPUs saw a drastic drop in value down to $235 from a recent high of $397. And some consumers thought that was potentially the beginning of the end for the GPU drought of 2017, but it wasn’t to be. Ethereum has recovered, and that means you are still competing with “miners” for the limited stock of Radeon RX 580s, GeForce GTX 1080s, and more.

Ethereum is trading well over $310 at the time of this posting, according to tracking site Coindesk. And that means a graphics card like the RX 580 (which starts at $250) is affordable enough for cryptocurrency miners to still earn a profit after factoring in energy costs. Ethereum is a digital coin that enables people to purchase access to distributed computing power. You can lend your PC’s power to that network to help solve those contracts in exchange for Ethereum — this is called “mining.” The price of Ethereum almost hit $400 on June 14, but miners were flooding the market in search of cost-efficient cards well before that point. The high price just meant that nearly every new GPU from both Nvidia and AMD was economically viable.