At that time, the crypto mining boom was in full swing, and many people were hoping to make some profit with graphics cards. But honestly, buying a more expensive graphics card isn’t always better—you need to look at the return on investment.

Bitcoin is no longer suitable to mine with ordinary graphics cards; professional mining rigs have become the mainstream. As for Ethereum, though, there’s still an opportunity, because the requirements for graphics cards are relatively lower. From 2018 to 2020, Ethereum’s overall network difficulty actually dropped quite a bit, which meant mining Ether with a graphics card was comparatively easier. On top of that, during that period, the price of Ether rose several times, and mining profits climbed along with it.

If your budget is limited, instead of buying a top-tier graphics card, calculate your payback period clearly. For example, the AMD Radeon RX 580 was around $200 back then, and you could earn close to $1 per day—so you could break even in about 7 months. At a similar price point, there was also the Nvidia RTX 2060 Super, priced at $399, with a payback period of about 14 months. Or consider the AMD RX 5700 XT—just over $400, with a break-even time of a little more than 8 months, and it still offers good value for money.

Of course, when choosing a graphics card, you need to think it through—mining difficulty will only keep increasing, and electricity costs have to be factored in too. Some older 4GB cards may end up being phased out after only a short time. Back then, both Nvidia and AMD were pushing the new generation of mining-focused graphics cards—stronger performance, but also higher prices.

Honestly, for ordinary people, buying graphics cards and mining directly is a pretty deep and risky undertaking. Without experience, it’s easy to fall into traps. Later, when cloud mining computing power became available, many people changed their way of thinking: rent the mining rigs’ computing power directly, hand the complex operation and maintenance over to the platform, and just sit there collecting the daily returns—much easier.