Recently cryptocurrency mining has has grown increasingly popular again due to the fact that the exchange rate for Ethereum coins has gone through the roof. As a consequence graphics card are even more sought after than usual leading to a shortage on the market. According to the price comparison portal Geizhals, prices are changing on a daily basis and several graphics card models are sold out since weeks. In other words, the mining hype is having a massive effect on the graphics card market.


Currently Ethereum is one of the most popular cryptocurrencies and responsible for the sudden increase in demand for graphics cards and therefore the shortage. The price of Ethereum has shot up massively during the past months coming close to $400 US. Although the value of Ethereum changes every single day, thousands of people are back with GPU mining. Since in the case of Ethereum graphics cards are the tool for mining cryptocurrencies, all those people buy whatever they can find to make more profit mining cryptocurrency coins.

So far the market for low end GPUs hasn't been affected by the shortage, but currently it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find mid-range or high-end graphics cards. Cards like the AMD Radeon RX 570 and RX 580 are sold out entirely since the ratio of hash rate to price was/is particularly interesting with these cards. In the case of NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1060 3GB and 6GB variant the availability is not yet a problem, but the prices for these cards have gone up significantly. It's the same story for the GTX 1070, which used to cost 370 Euro and now it sells for at least 477 Euro.

At the moment everyone is asking if the GPU shortage is going to end soon. Unfortunately, there isn't a precise answer to this question. So far, it looks like some manufacturers of graphics cards expect the mining hype to continue since they are launching graphics card designed for mining cryptocurrency specifically.




Source: Coinmarketcap