HARD TIMES

What a time to be a PC enthusiast...

It has been an amazing six months for PC hardware. Killer new processors, great new video cards, and a whole lot more, but... can anyone even afford a video card today, let alone find one? Crypto-miners have once again jacked up the prices of a lot of the hardware we love, making it a tough time for anyone looking to upgrade their machines.

And it’s not just video cards suffering, though they’re certainly hard to find. The new Chia crypto-currency is based on storage space, so a lot of Asian markets are starting to feel drive shortages, which is trickling down to pretty much everywhere.

And as if not being able to grab a cool new video card isn’t bad enough, there’s a massive ecological impact, too! According to a recent ABC report, crypto-mining is consuming as much electricity as every data-center on the planet!

Crypto – just say no!

David Hollingworth

“... can anyone even afford a video card today, let alone find one?”

According to a screenshot from a mining group posted to PTT, a popular Taiwanese bulletin board, miners in China are selling off a large number of Nvidia and AMD GPUs (via HKEPC). These include the latest 30-series or 6000-series, but also other older GPU generations, such as AMD’s cheap and cheerful Polaris generation.

Cryptocurrency miners in China are beginning to sell off GPUs for cheap

This mouse has a fan in it, for those sweaty matches

In what’s undoubtedly the natural technological step for those hollow mice we’ve seen folks like Ninja hawking for a few years, someone’s gone and put a tiny fan inside a gaming mouse. The Zephyr Pro promises a “more powerful and higherperformance sweatproof gaming mouse”, in case you were unimpressed with the performance of your other sweatproof gaming mice.