Why did AMD GPU's spike so much in price?

#My friend wants to buy one but they are all way over priced. My 7950 I paid like $259 for on sale is like $400 now. What happened?

You're pretty late, liteconiners or bitcoiners bought huge amount of them, they're out of stock, that's the reason for the high price.

I thought so many people were bitcoining there really wasn't money to be made from this now?

A combination of mining and AMD having almost no stock before the mining boom (high demand for the cards came during a time that AMD had very little stock to begin with).

Do you guys think there is a profit in this after paying electricity for it?

exactly. even if the electricity was free, it would be hard to make a profit... the huge cost of power these days it just isn't. I imagine half these people are kids using their parents power and don't realize the cost... or people leaching off power from a workplace or some other source...

I doubt many use their own power because it just doesn't add up to any useful profit if you factor in the insane cost of power and the hardware costs and replacement costs of broken gpus or other components when they fail from 24/7 usage

Litecoin, and no ninecall. You can easily factor in the power usage by kwh and check if it's worth it.

For litecoin there is a lot of money to be made.One tribe player I know started with a single amd gpu(can't remember which) and now has 4x7970s or 290s(can't remember) all from the profit of the first.

Dogecoin is also another viable alternative.

Nobody mines bitcoins on gpus.

I heard the whole mining coins is going to end by the end of the 2nd Q of this year.