AMD's upcoming Vega range of graphics cards may not be as powerful as fans initially hoped, but that doesn't mean they won't be popular. Indeed they could end up selling out in minutes and not just because of gamer interest. It turns out that much like AMD's last generation of graphics cards, the RX 500 series, the Vega cards are insanely good at mining cryptocurrencies.
While Ethereum and other currencies have lost a lot of value in recent weeks as the complexity of mining the currencies has increased, it's still nigh-on impossible to find a reasonably priced RX 400 or RX 500 series graphics card. That's because they're great at mining the digital coins, much better than comparably priced Nvidia GPUs, despite the latters increased power.
Now Vega seems set to suffer the same fate, with claimed performance of the new Vega cards offering as much as four times the mining performance of a single RX 580. These claims come from the head of products at UK retailer, Overclockers UK, who claims that the company will need to implement some purchasing restrictions to make sure that miners don't immediately buy up every card available, as has happened with other card releases in the last few months.
Set to debut on August 14, it's possible that the best way to get a hold of these new cards will be through AMD's bundles, which make a lot more sense now than they did. If you're forced to pay extra to get money off of other, non-miner hardware, perhaps some cryptohounds will be put off splashing out on quite so many cards.
Regardless, if you're hoping to get a new Vega GPU, get one early.