Bottom line: Biostar, an OEM that lines its pants with miners’ money, has begun advertising a new mining system that comes equipped with eight Radeon RX 580s. It says that it can guarantee availability in large quantities for interested parties, or in other words, it has a lot of GPUs to sell.
Manufacturers have tried to pretend like they’re not selling GPUs to cryptominers for the most part. Even Sapphire, which makes GPUs specifically for miners, doesn’t advertise them on their site. Both AMD and Nvidia try hard to get their GPUs into the hands of gamers—admittedly for business reasons, not altruistic ones.
Biostar is an unfortunate exception. As VideoCardz points out, it’s been making motherboards for mining systems throughout the GPU shortage. In the past, it hasn’t had enough GPUs to sell them to miners in bulk, but now the shortage is easing, it apparently does.
It’s a shame that AMD is providing Biostar with GPUs. As far as we’re aware, it’s AMD’s policy to prioritize OEMs that sell to gamers, but maybe its hands are tied.
Biostar’s new system—which we’re not going to name outright because you shouldn’t buy one—has eight RX 580s, an Intel G4900 CPU, and 8 GB of DDR4. Biostar’s pictures show that the RX 580s are gaming cards with proper cooling hardware and display outputs.
It’s a terrible waste, but it could be worse. In our latest GPU price update, we found that the RX 580 was one of the easier to acquire cards and one that was getting close to its MSRP on the second-hand market. It isn’t a great deal, but you can at least get one if you want one.
From a cryptomining perspective, the Biostar system isn’t particularly appealing. Ethereum’s value is continuing to fall even as network difficulty rises. And the RX 580 isn’t an ideal miner; it’s hot and past its prime.
So, whether you’re a miner or a gamer, we recommend avoiding Biostar for the time being. And, Biostar, please stop sending us press releases for mining hardware.
Image credit: Niclas Illg
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