For years, it was impossible to get a cheap graphics card to play the latest releases, at least at its original MSRP. All this following the crypto mining: The chips used by graphics cards, GPUs, were particularly efficient in carrying out the calculations necessary for the generation of certain cryptocurrencies.
Fortunately, those days are over and in recent months the market has stabilized; It’s now possible to find powerful graphics cards at a good price, so it seems like now is the best time to buy a gaming computer.
But now history can repeat itself, with processors. And some cryptocurrency enthusiasts have discovered that some computer processors are also very good for “mining”; to the point that it is profitable to buy one of the most powerful models and dedicate it exclusively to this function. As a result, these processors are already out of stock in some stores.
New craze for cryptography with processors
Specifically, the most sought-after model currently for mining is the Ryzen 9 7950X, a processor aimed at enthusiasts for its performance/price ratio, not only in gaming, but also for all types of heavy tasks thanks to the 32 threads that it is capable of executing at the same time. In fact, it’s so cheap for what it offers that it’s one of the best options on the market right now.
However, this could be the fans’ downfall. According to Profit Mine, one of the benchmarks in the crypto sector, a Ryzen 9 7950X He generated $3 profit per day with the Qubic cryptocurrency; Additionally, it generated $1 profit per day in popular currencies such as Zephyr.
Ryzen 9 7000 series processor
It’s not much, and as of this writing these values have fallen, but it’s enough to make it worth it, especially in large quantities and with a bull market driven by strong growth of Bitcoin, which yesterday crossed the $73,000 mark. If history repeats itself, CPUs could be as sought-after as GPUs were in their day, which is already noticeable: yesterday, some stores were already displaying the “Sold out” sign.
Although CPUs have always been used for cryptocurrency mining, they have never been particularly effective at this task. This has changed with some parts like Qubic, which take advantage of the AVX2 and AVX512 instructions present in AMD’s Zen 4 architecture; Consequently, all latest Ryzen CPUs are good with these partsAlthough the 7950X offers the best balance between performance, price and power consumption.
