Sunday, January 19, 2014

iBuyPower offers Desktop PC’s optimized for virtual money mining. Beginning of a new trend?



Desktop PC series dubbed CoinMine are entering the market at a time when more and more people joins the captivate world of crypto-currencies. AMD-based system starts at $999, while the version with Intel Core i3 and 8GB of RAM costs $1559 or more.

The main differentiating factor from other merchants is the possibility to configure up to 3 video cards from the AMD Radeon R9 series, a most popular choice among the crypto-currencies miners due to their high computational performance.

In the area of Bitcoin mining, even with the strongest configuration, this setup based on graphics cards will hardly be able to compete with specialized hardware called ASICs. But the alternative crypto-currencies like Litecoin or Dogecoin have adjusted their algorithm for minting new money, which makes it much harder for manufacturers to assemble dedicated mining hardware for them.

Since the setup with several graphics cards remains the most viable option for mining those currencies, buyers of iBuyPower’s series will be able to get back at least a part of their investment, if they choose to mine and then sell their generated coins in the exchanges like Cryptsy or BTER.

As the various crypto-money are on its way to become more popular in the near future, PC’s with more computing power focused on virtual coins mining makes an economic sense. We can expect that more manufacturers will follow this trend, or even choose to offer models with Bitcoin’s ASICs build in. Those “rigs” could also be pre-installed with mining software, configured for optimal performance.