AMD’s Radeon R9 290X graphics card is an excellent, top-of-the-line piece of PC hardware, and is easily one of the best graphics cards you can get your hands on today. In fact, it’s so popular that it’s reportedly sold out here in the US.
Why it’s sold out is another matter though. And no, it’s not because hordes of video editors and PC gamers are swiping them off shelves to build multi-GPU systems. While that is likely happening too, that doesn’t appear to be where most of the demand for this card is these days.
Instead, the Radeon R9 290X’s current lack of availability has allegedly been driven by the demand of Litecoin miners. The card isn’t cheap either. Though the Radeon R9 290X launched with an initial $549 MSRP, some sites and stores have sold it for over $600 and $700, taking advantage of two main factors: low supply and high demand.
More: How to Buy Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Dogecoin
Mining Litecoin, or any kind of cryptocurrency that’s worth anything, is extremely taxing on computer hardware. Therefore, you need super powerful hardware in order to get the job done. In fact, mining Bitcoin, Litecoin, and other altcoins is so stressful that there’s hardware built specifically for the purpose.
It’ll be interesting to see how long the R9 290X will remain to be in short supply, and whether this will begin to spur increased sales of certain Nvidia graphics cards, like the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780Ti.
What do you think? Sound off in the comments below.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Google DeepMind's AI world model Genie 4 can now build interactive worlds that you can explore and reshape as they run. It also generates ambient sounds, music, and dialogue that respond to your actions.
The new world model builds on Genie 3 with improved realism, more natural human movement, and better simulations of real-world physics. It could eventually help with everything from game development to training robots.
Apple has an incredible talent for making me admire its products while simultaneously questioning what on earth it's thinking with the pricing. This isn't even something as bizarre as a monitor stand, but the audacity for starting a new laptop lineup from $2,000 doesn't surprise me.
The newly announced 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 is just the latest to showcase this. The funny thing is, I already know that it's going to be a reliable workstation. You get a powerful new 2nm M6 processor, a gorgeous Liquid Retina XDR display, and up to 24 hours of battery life. We were impressed by the M5 MacBook Air, so the high-end M6 powered MacBook Pro definitely won't let us down.