Despite trailing NVIDIA on the performance front, AMD has carved out a very successful niche for itself in the crypto market. Not that green team doesn’t have popular mining cards of its own (e.g., GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER), but a new report from MyDrivers claims that Radeon GPUs are in such high demand for mining that manufacturers have begun selling entire stocks of Radeon RX 5700 XT, Radeon RX 5600 XT, Radeon RX 590, and Radeon RX 580 GPUs directly to mining farms.
“According to the information received, throughout September, XFX did not give agents several graphics cards in China,” according to a machine translation shared by VideoCardz. “Almost all mainstream models on the market such as RX 580 8GB, RX 590 8GB, RX 5600 XT, RX 5700 XT, etc. are out of stock.”
“As for the reason, it is said that after XFX received these chips from AMD, they directly sold them to the miners, completely becoming ‘mining cards,’ causing the agents to not get the goods at all.”
This type of business isn’t encouraged by AMD (nor NVIDIA), but clearly, there’s no stopping XFX and similar companies from skirting parts of the retail system for some quick and guaranteed capital.
In addition to the SKUs listed above, AMD’s now-discontinued Radeon VII has also been heralded in Ethereum mining circles. That GPU reportedly flaunts a hash rate of 90 MH/s.