How about a Radeon R9 290X for 900 bucks?  — 12:16 PM on
February 14, 2014  If you've been following these things at all,
you probably know that the Radeon R9 290X and its little
brother, the R9 290, have been selling at steep premiums for a
while now. The 290X's suggested list price is $549, and the
290's is $399. Although both cards have been relatively easy to
find in stock at online retailers, they've been going for
something like $200 above list.  The problem is one of supply
and demand, of course. Resellers are raising prices in the face
of scarcity.  One trend has created a major distortion in the
market on the supply side: crypto-coin miners have evidently
been snapping up high-end Radeons like mad in order to build
mining farms. Today's Radeons happen to be unusually good at
crunching the make-work algorithms used by coins like Litecoin,
and that makes them essentially money-printing machines. As long
as the power consumption and other costs work out right, it's
possible to reap a calculated profit b