AMD Announcing There Are No More Radeon R9 GPU Shortages 15 May

2014

In a message from AMD sent to press they have announced that the company has good availability of their AMD Radeon R9 product lineup and there are no more shortages. And not only that you can easily get a Radeon R9 280x now for example, but you can also get it at a lower prices as there is no price speculation caused by shortages. Of course AMD is focusing on gamers, though we all know that the shortages were all caused by people buying the cards for crypto currency mining and not for gaming. Below you can see a quote of the message sent to press:

Dear Editor, You’ve seen many articles, discussions online about the AMD Radeon R9 lineup – especially chatter about pricing and availability. As we’ve talked about it before, the demand for the R9 lineup has been nothing but astonishing, and went well beyond our most optimistic expectations. That created a situation where gamers weren’t able to purchase their desired R9 graphics card. We have good news! All R9 Series products are now available and in stock at worldwide retailers, and street prices have returned to the SEP (or below)! The chart below should help you get a good overview of the current stack and pricing. Now that product is available and at suggested pricing, these prices will remain stable. No more madness like you saw in Q1. I’d like to direct your attention to the AMD Radeon R9 280 – which is now available starting at SEP price of 180€ + VAT ($249 in the US). You will see this price in effect right now on a few items with more on the way. You have most likely not had many of these boards in your lab, and we have a batch of samples available from multiple board partners waiting to be benchmarked. Please let us know if you’d like to review one of the AIB SKUs based on the R9 280. In tandem with the stable pricing and wide availability, we’ve re-launched our Never Settle Forever bundle program to include over 20 titles from which gamers can pick and choose. In addition, we’ve lined up a few brand new games to add to this promotion, and we’ll be sharing more info with you in the next few weeks! In summary – for all those gamers who were unsure whether to purchase an R9 graphics card, this is exactly the right time to do so. AMD’s performance and enthusiast line-up has never been more competitive. Armed with technologies like Mantle, TrueAudio, the AMD Radeon R9 series of products offer the best performance and value in every segment from 145€ to 1300€! Should you have any questions, please let me know. Kind regards,

AMD PR team

The reason for enough R9 availability is the fact that due to Scrypt mining moving to ASIC mining hardware people are no longer building GPU-based mining rigs like crazy and thus the demand for the video cards is not so high anymore. Also at the moment on the second hand market you can find some great deals on cards used for mining that still have warranty remaining at some really good prices. So why buy new cards when you can get perfectly working ones at even lower price as so many people are selling their GPUs in order to get Scrypt ASIC miners.

Fear not however, GPU mining is not dead, it is just most likely going to take some more time to be revived yet again with the move to another strong alternative crypto currency that is going to replace Litecoin. In the last few days we’ve seen DarkCoin going pretty well, especially after the release of X11 mining support for Nvidia GPUs. There are however multiple other contenders such as VertCoin for example, so do not be in a hurry to sell your GPU hardware yer, or you might regret it later on.