Mining is more popular than ever. People are making thousands of dollars a month with small investments. Those who put 10 or 20 thousand dollars in mining can make more than a hundred thousand in a year or two. What a huge ROI (return on investment)!

Of course, everybody want(ed) to jump in and grab a part of the cake, which increased demand for graphic cards A LOT!

Consequently, today we are facing massive graphics card shortages. Situation is the worst in Europe, but not much better in other parts of the world. Dramatic increase in demand for cryptocurrency mining hardware drives prices of GPUs to go up. In Russia they increased for 80 percent in less than a year.

Global surge in demand for GPUs has pushed companies to innovate and it was a matter of time when first model will be launched.

Even though there were rumors that Nvidia and other manufacturers are working on graphics cards for cryptocurrency miners, the Sapphire Technology has beaten all others to the punch and becomes the only manufacturer with consumer-based graphics cards for miners on the market.

Sapphire Technology made first graphic cards design solely for cryptocurrency mining.

Characteristics

Sapphire Technology will be releasing 5 different GPUs:

• Sapphire Radeon RX 470 MINING Edition 8192MB GDDR5 Samsung 7 Gbps (11256-38-10G) – 25-28MH/s ETH
• Sapphire Radeon RX 470 MINING Edition 8192MB GDDR5 7 Gbps (11256-37-10G) – 24-27MH/s ETH
• Sapphire Radeon RX 470 MINING Edition 4096MB GDDR5 Samsung 7 Gbps (11256-36-10G) – 24-27 MH/s ETH
• Sapphire Radeon RX 470 MINING Edition 4096MB GDDR5 7 Gbps (11256-35-10G) – 23-26 MH/s ETH
• Sapphire Radeon RX 560 Pulse MINING Edition 4096MB (11267-11-10G) – 12-15 MH/s ETH

Four cards are based on AMD’s Radeon RX 470 GPU with different video memory configurations and they do not have external video connectors. One is based on AMD Radeon RX 560 GPU also labeled as Mining Edition, but it has a single DVI connector on the back, so it can be used for other things than just crypto mining.

Two GPUs are using Samsung memory chip which clocks a little higher than Elpida chips. As you can see Samsung is providing one MH/s more than Elpida.

They are available to preorder at OverclockersUK and the price ranges from 170 pounds for Sapphire Radeon RX 560 Mining Edition 4GB to 300 pounds for Sapphire Radeon RX 470 Mining Edition 8GB (Samsung memory chip).

These cards can be used in mining alternative crypto currencies such as Ethereum and Litecoin.

Limitations

First of all, they are backed by (only?) one year warranty. Regularly, gaming cards do come with two or even three years warranty (depending on the market).

Secondly, they can’t be sold to gamers (except Radeon RX 560). These graphic cards do not feature display ports, so they are not able to be used for any purpose other than cryptocurrency mining.

Thirdly, the prices are not competitive. They have to be lower than gaming variants. If not, there will be no demand for them.

What is your opinion? Are these graphics cards solution for the future crypto mining? Would you buy them or not? Why?

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