The many Radeons and GeForces in the TR labs aren't being harnessed for the Ethereum cryptocurrency craze, but many other prospective tycoons have been buying AMD Radeon RX 570s and Radeon RX 580s by the truckload to take a crack at getting some of that digital dinero in their wallets. That means retailers have largely been able to sell through their stocks of Polaris 10 and Polaris 20 cards even with stickers many hundreds of dollars more than AMD's suggested retail price, leaving midrange system builders without a shot at our favorite affordable graphics cards.
Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1060 and GTX 1070 cards aren't immune from the craze, either. Our preferred GTX 1060 6GB cards are now selling for about $300 and up, while GTX 1070s are selling for nearly as much as the GTX 1080. If you're after a GTX 1060, it's still possible to get one for a relatively reasonable price, but gamers shopping for a GTX 1070 now have little reason not to go for a fully-enabled GP104 card. On the other hand, GTX 1080 Tis seem safe from miners for now, assuming $700-and-up graphics cards weren't an obstacle to your wallet in the first place.
Ethereum's price seems to be on a downward swing at the moment, so it's possible graphics card prices may slowly return to normalcy in the near term. Still, we're wondering how this cryptocurrency-fueled gold rush has affected regular system builders that read TR. Have you been forced to buy a lower-performing card than you wanted to stay on budget? Have you held off buying the card you wanted in hopes that Ethereum miners would have to move on to other methods? Or did you choose to step up to a higher-performing card as prices for midrange pixel-pushers skyrocketed? Let us know using the poll options below.