A recent leak claims that the Radeon RX 6800 is an Ethereum mining machine, so much so that its performance is 50% higher compared to the one offered by an overclocked GeForce RTX 3090. Yes, you read that correctly, the standard version (not XT) of the Radeon RX 6800 outperforms the most powerful NVIDIA graphics card in Ethereum.
I know that, a priori, this may seem positive, in the end we are talking about a graphics card that will have priced at $ 579 and that surpasses Ethereum mining a model that has a cost of $ 1,499, but the truth is that, for the common user, this is bad, very bad. Let’s find out why.
Before getting into the subject, let’s go with a bit of historical memory. When the cryptocurrency “boom” occurred a huge demand was generated for graphics cards to perform mining tasks, which made the price of this component would shoot enormously, and that the stock of many models was reduced to an incredibly low level.
The sale price of the models with the best performance in mining, such as the RX 570 and RX 580, rose in such a way that it reached, in some cases, 500 euros. The 6GB GTX 1060, GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 suffered the same fate, although their price increase was less marked compared to AMD’s Radeon. With the bursting of the cryptocurrency bubble, the situation began a slow normalization process that led to a situation of generational coexistence that was very harmful for the consumer. Well, that is the scenario that we do not want to be repeated with the Radeon RX 6800.
Radeon RX 6800: will its selling price skyrocket?
If the rumors are true and your Ethereum mining performance is that good, your demand could end up being huge, and this would end up disproportionately affected the sale price, as happened at the time with previous generations.
Taking a look at the value of Ethereum we see that, over the last year, it has skyrocketed, and has gone from just over $ 100 to exceed the $ 480 barrier, although right now it is around 450 dollars per unit. If we put all this in context the conclusion is clear, mining it is very profitable, and if the Radeon RX 6800 exceeds the mining performance of an RTX 3090 by 50%, its demand from miners is going to be enormous.
AMD shared, at the time, a series of recommendations with retailers to prevent speculators and miners from taking over the entire stock of the new Radeon RX 6000, but the truth is that your stock level is going to be quite low during its first launch phase, so everything seems to indicate that it will be difficult to get a unit at a good price.
Hopefully AMD can overcome those initial stock limitations and get a good number of Radeon RX 6000 units on the market as soon as possible, as this would allow you to take advantage of the Christmas campaign to regain market share in the GPU sector. In this sense, the Radeon RX 6800 plays a fundamental role because it is, from a price-performance perspective, one of the most interesting solutions from AMD.