Sapphire RX 570 Video Card with 16GB GDDR5 Spotted

RX 570 with Twice the Memory

According to Chinese tech website MyDrivers, Sapphire is preparing a new AMD Radeon RX 570 video card variant. Instead of the usual 8GB of GDDR5, this version apparently packs twice as much at 16GB.

While that sounds interesting for gamers, here comes the bad news. It appears to be made strictly to capitalize on the re-emergence of GPU crypto mining.

Wait, Isn’t GPU Crypto-mining Dead?

Although many believe crypto-mining by GPU is all but dead, here comes Grin Coin. It is attracting a lot of attention including approximately 100 million dollars of mostly VC money invested into special-purpose investment vehicles to mine it. Some are even calling it Bitcoin 2.0.

This coin supports ASIC Resistant Cuckaroo and ASIC Friendly Cuckatoo algorithms, and it needs 5.5GB and 11GB of VRAM respectively to run. Thus, the Sapphire RX 570 16GB video card is perfect for it.

All those mining farms in China and around the world are not going away easily. Especially with the possibility of a second crypto wave coming. Whether or not it will affect the GPU market as drastically once again remains to be seen.

We can’t definitely blame Sapphire for trying to capitalize on it early.