Let's face it, with the current chip shortages worldwide, decent priced GPUs are just not available. The minute they hit the market, scalpers suck them all up like hungry vacuum cleaners and extort stupid amounts of money from desperate people...desperate crypto miners and desperate gamers.
I got into the crypto mining game late but managed to buy a full gaming pc setup for £1200 with a good spec Nvidia gpu to start mining Eth. Thought I'd look around for some additional cards to boost my hashrate and...you guessed it. Nothing. Everywhere I looked I hit a brick wall. Ads and Google links lured me in with promises of availability at decent prices but when I clicked through to all the usual high street places and some more obscure online ones, everywhere was actually sold out with no info on when they would be available again. You could either buy something really rubbish (no thanks!) or something decent but at scalpers prices, or very high spec GPU cards at market prices but way out of my league. Even Amazon was sold out. But then one day I found a card on Amazon that was available for £359!
AFOX Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB GDDR6 128Bit HDMI 3xDP ATX
Now, I hadn't heard of AFOX before, but given the card had an advertised hash of 25mh/s and I only had 36mh/s running, I figured it was worth a try. I purchased said GPU card mid April, hubby installed it when it arrived 2 days later, and it runs like a dream. Very consistently giving 25mh/s as advertised on Ethermine and with Eth rapidly climbing price, it is doing very nicely indeed. Of course, it sold out shortly afterwards and I figured that was it then, but...it keeps coming back in stock and still at a very fair £359. It has been back in stock twice since then, and I would have bought another but for the timing. With Eth rising I had put the rest of my available funds straight into crypto. As of today, not currently in stock again but it is regularly in stock every couple of weeks so if you are looking for a decent little GPU that actually delivers and produces it's fair share of "found shares" on Ethermine, then you can't really go wrong, especially considering 2 of these would give you 50mh/s which is more than my Nvidia 2060 Super gives me, the latter being available on ebay at the mo for around £540. Hash rate /£1 for the AFOX is 0.0696 mhash/£1 cost, whereas the Nvidia is 0.0667 mhash/£1 cost. Now I don't have anything against EBAY sellers but, given I pay for Amazon Prime, I personally will go the Amazon route again, especially as I know the product is genuine, regularly available and on quick delivery, and I could squeeze another of these babies into my setup without having to upgrade the power supply which I would have to do with another Radeon 2060 Super.
Anyway, hope that helps anyone still looking for a sensible and cost effective way to increase their hash power.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/AFOX-Radeon-5500-GDDR6-128Bit/dp/B08WJH4CCJ
