If you want to start mining for digital currencies then you might consider not buying them from eBay or retailers but to make a purchase from the manufacturers themselves.
It is not news that retailers’ speculations on prices sometimes make quite a large interest. However, as popularity of mining Doge, Bitcoin and Litecoin is growing higher every day the price that retailers ask for the mining processors are going through the roof.
For example GH 600 by Butterfly Labs can be acquired for mere $2,196, buying directly form their site but if you were to purchase one on eBay you would have to pay as much as 3,4 thousand dollars. And I did not included $70 shipping in the mentioned price. One would wonder, if there is a demand for such a price and actually, there is. On the day when the lot was closed, eight people were watching it.
The reason for such prices is the recent surge of demand for the AMD GPUs. Although, if the news from the field are correct, the next graphic card mining trend will be NVidia with their new Maxwell architecture that uses up twice as less power for the same performance as AMD.
The fact that NVidia are about to win the race of arms against AMD is actually pretty good for the new altcoin miners (For Bitcoin you would need something more powerful than GPUs) as the “green” graphic card manufacturer usually tries to maintain a higher degree of control over the prices for their products.
This would also benefit gamers, as the prices for AMD may go lower and, probably they would be easier to find because of mass turn of attention toward the NVidia. Anyway, if you plan on buying the mining rig I suggest you purchase them right from the manufacturers. The shipping maybe somehow longer but the heightened difficulty doesn’t cover the extra buck that you would be giving the retailers.