Prices of R9 cards are skyrocketing

R9 280x's are selling for upwards of $450 on ebay! I'm actually considering selling my 3 days old 280x to buy a GTX 780.

Newegg has raised the price for your average 280x from $300 to $390, and at the moment all of them are out of stock. This coin rush is really fucking things up for gamers. I'm just glad I got mine for $300 w/BF4 before this craziness started.

No one will buy AMD GPUs at that price, the whole point was that their sold cheap, people now either wait or buy Nvidia GPUs

@PredatorRules: A LOT of people are buying them, but not for gaming purposes. Like I said, people are using them to mine Litecoins.

I don't know what that means but I bought mine to game. Unless someone will buy my GPU at the price of actual GTX780 I won't sell it.

@PredatorRules: I'm attempting to sell mine for 460 right now, let's see how it goes :)

Glad I bought a 7950 over a GTX 760 2 months ago. Cost me $50 less and I have the chance to turn it around for nearly $200 profit. (before Ebay fees, of course)

Could end up with a non-reference R9 290 and it would only cost me ~$230-$250 in the end. That's pretty epic if you ask me.

I still have my old 6870 laying around so I could put up with poorer performance for a little while.

Good luck

@HavocV3: LOL yea. Now is the time sell your AMD card.

The Litecoin ****s gotta ruin everything.

Curious how this will affect pricing RE: the non-ref cards.

Supply and demand. There is limited amount of supply with so many people are demanding it. The option is to wait for a couple of months or buy the 270x card. I dont think video games will radically improve in graphic quality in two months.

Soon I assume you can get a Radeon card very cheap.

Kind of interesting how the price was going down due to all of the negative feedback about heat, noise, and throttling issues with the reference cooler. I saw 290X cards for $500 a couple of weeks ago. And now they've shot up to $50 above MSRP because of litecoin miners.

I still dont understand how GPUs mine bitcoins. This is just freaking weird

7950 a few days ago were going for crazy prices. Its because the performance per watt for litecoin mining is the best for any card.

you're using your gpu to solve algorithms, and when it's done you get X amount of currency, like bitcoins or litecoins. Bitcoin mining is a waste on home desktops these days though, but litecoins are easier

Either way, the time to get into bitcoin or litecoin mining was a few years ago when they could be mined very easily. At this point it's too difficult and requires too much energy to be worthwhile as the difficulty periodically ramps up, and Bitcoins are the point where you need specialized hardware (ASICs) to mine them without taking an eternity and losing money on energy costs.

It's a great time to be a gamer with a high-end AMD card though, because you can sell it to one of these buttcoin or ass penny mining clowns for more than you paid and buy something even better from nVidia. That's what I did. I sold my 290X for $630 last week and bought a 780 Ti.

The way cryptocurrency is distributed is by "mining". That is, those who are willing to devote their computer to basically descramble a seemingly unusable chunk of code into a useable and valid bitcoin/litecoin. The whole idea of cryptocurrency is that you can track transactions to make sure coins are valid, the whole system can be verified to make sure transactions and coins are accounted for. This thwarts counterfeit coins and transactions.

Usually they make the level of difficulty to unscramble higher as more get distributed. Thus, coins are controllably released to the general population for those willing to put the work into descrambling them.

So is it just mindless scrambling? or is this "descrambling codes" finding the cure for cancer?

It's descrambling for the sake of the piece of the pie. So no, it's nothing useful.

Well dang! I was wanting to buy one soon!

It's like being the middle man who handles the transactions. I think that's how it works.

Pretty much.

It's too bad the mining is basically just doing meaningless math problems. It's so much wasted electricity and computing power that could be put towards something useful, like protein folding for cancer and Alzheimer's research. Someone needs to come up with a crypto-currency where the mining process does something beneficial for humanity. I might even participate if someone came up with something like that. Instead it's just a bunch of greedy assholes wasting electricity.

According to your logic we shouldn't be playing video games because it's also not helping curing cancer. Good stuff dude, you totally don't sound like a dumbass.

Playing a video game doesn't require me to have a farm of power guzzling computers.

Seriously, go take a look at some of the setups these miners are running and tell me that's not a massive waste of electricity, at a time when there's an energy crisis and the planet is experiencing man made gobal warming. And at least video games provide enjoyment. Doing pointless math problems accomplishes what exactly? It's computing power and electricity that should be put towards something worthwhile.

You're the one who sounds like a dumbass. Now go back to commenting on football with the other boneheads. You seem way out of your element in this thread.

WTF? Plenty of video games will use the maximum capacity out of your gpu(s) anyway. And why stop here, don't watch the TV, you're not saving the kids!

Video games don't require farms of quad crossfire GPU setups or ASICs guzzling electricity 24/7.

And? We're all using electrical things we don't actually need everyday.

I'm certainly not running anything that uses this kind of electricity in my daily life.

@bigfootpart2 said:

I'm certainly not running anything that uses this kind of electricity in my daily life.

And tell me, what percentage of electrical usage does that represent next to the entire planet?

Hey aren't you the same idiot who came into a technical support thread where i had solved a guy's problem and started trying to argue with me because you gave him stupid advice that didn't actually fix his problem? You seem like a troll who's just intent on starting fights with people.

What? I never go on that forum. Sounds like you're trying to change topic because you know you're getting bopped in this argument.

Actually your the one who is making a pointless argument. So to elaborate:

1. Crypto currencies are self sufficient in the sense that once they are established it is up to the processing power of the people who "mine" blocks.

2. Real currencies take enormous machines that create money, god knows how much material, and at the end of the day to create crypto currency, you need just electricity.

3. You tardfaces, a very select amount of people run gpu farms for litecoins because of such a high investment for such little return (someone running a has rate of about 24 Mh/s would be making 280-300$ a day, from top of the line gpus, which good luck getting them). The bitcoin miners all rely on ASIC's which are built for the sole purpose of being power efficient, so the profit is maximized. Anyone and I mean ANYONE who runs a gpu to mine bitcoins is wasting their time, very few gpu's have a high enough hashrate to break even when it comes time to add in the power bill.

So no they aren't volunteering their 500$ gpu's to fold proteins to hopefully cure cancer, but they are using their processing power and electricity to make back the money.

I guess we should go yell at stock brookers because they are wasting electricty running all those monitors in order to make money. Oh wait, because that's an established job position and career that doesn't count.

RevanBITW, you do know these guys are right? Your the one trying to derail the thread.

There is nothing about bigfoots' reply where he states that playing video games is bad for not helping cure cancer. Your the one who pulled that idea out of thin air with your own logic, not his. You are right though, he "totally" doesn't sound like a dumbass. Also, not trying to gang up and pick on you, but using "totally" as an adverb doesn't make you look too bright.

---------------------------------------------

AAAAnyways, I'm thinking of jumping ship over to Nvidia but I dont know what the equivalents are, I been on AMD/Ati for my last 2 upgrade cycles. What are the equivalents for the 7970,7990,R290,R290X? I want something that can handle 4k gaming

@bigfootpart2 said:

I'm certainly not running anything that uses this kind of electricity in my daily life.

not really a problem if you invested in solar already

@JigglyWiggly_ said:

@bigfootpart2 said:

I'm certainly not running anything that uses this kind of electricity in my daily life.

not really a problem if you invested in solar already

/argument

Also just one more note. You do realize that the servers that you play your precious games on are generally at server farms which make this shit look like amateur hour.

Good thing I was able to grab an R9 270 (non-x) before the price increase. It's ridiculous what's going with this frenzy. I bought the video card for my cousin for his new Gaming Rig I built for the budget.

servers generally don't have powerful gpus.

No, but they use up a hell of a lot of power.

Edit: which was the point I was making was about the power usage. But since the servers aren't finding the cure for cancer, I guess they need to get shut down amirite?

those are generally co-located if the servers are that big so you have to pay less kw/h

i don't think anyone care what they are doing with the cards, all i know is that amd is making a lot of money from. that's a good thing because amd's cpu's may be garbage but their gpus are decent

Weird, either I was posting in the wrong thread or my post disappeared somehow.

Anyways, I managed to sell my 280x on ebay for ~$400 after ebay fees and shipping. I added $60 to the $400 and bought a GTX 780.