Radeon RX 5700 series GPUs could face shortages due to increased mining profitability

It seems GPU mining could once again seriously impact current-gen GPU prices that had stabilized over the past year. As of September 3, 2020, for instance, AMD Radeon RX 5700 cards are already out of stock or severely limited in many popular online stores. Its big sibling, the Radeon RX 5700 XT, will likely join them soon, along with some cards from the "green" camp (RTX 2070 and RTX 2080).

Amid rising GPU prices, our colleagues at WccfTech conducted a small study on the so-called "profitability" of mining Ethereum using the Betterhash application (we haven't specifically verified it, so proceed with caution) and an RX 5700 XT GPU. Here's what they found:

A single RX 5700 XT card yields just over $5 per day, which ultimately translates to $157 per month.

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That's pretty good for passive income, right? Adding a second RX 5700 GPU essentially doubles the yield: $10 per day and $327 per month.

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But is it all so rosy in reality? Unfortunately, no. Keep in mind that as more miners join the network (and if you, your friends, and then friends of friends all jump in, the number of "diggers" will truly skyrocket), your profits will shrink. This is because as the number of "miners" increases, the difficulty of mining cryptocurrency rises quite sharply, significantly narrowing the "window of real profitability" (short-term hardware payback).

Given all the above, it's quite difficult to give a definitive answer on whether it's worth buying Radeon RX 5700 / GeForce RTX 2070 series cards at inflated prices right now. Especially since NVIDIA just announced the stunning RTX 3070 yesterday, and AMD is also rumored to be showing off something interesting soon.

Source: WccfTech