A hot potato: Given the chip shortage and its effect on graphics cards' availability/prices, using gaming GPUs in mining cards is a controversial move, but it does happen. Joining the companies that engage in this practice is Sapphire, which has created the X080 and X060 mining cards based on AMD's RDNA 2 architecture found in the Radeon RX 6000 series.

The images and spec sheets for the two graphics cards, the Sapphire GPRO X080 & the GPRO X060, were leaked by El Chapuza Informatico (via VideoCardz), showing their Ethash performance and other details.

The Sapphire GPRO X080 uses a Navi 22 GPU with 2,304 cores (36 CUs), a clock speed reaching 2,132 MHz, and features 10GB of 160-bit GDDR6 memory clocked at 16 Gbps, giving a bandwidth of 320 GB/s. It uses the PCIe Gen 4.0 x16 interface and only works with Linux. As with many other mining cards, it lacks any display outputs.

The Sapphire GPRO X080 offers around 38.05 MH/s@165W, though it can be tuned to ~41.6 MH/s@93W. For comparison, the Navi 23-based Radeon RX 6600 XT has a tuned mining performance of 32 MH/s@55W.

The GPRO X060, meanwhile, is a Navi 23 XL-based miner with 1,792 Stream Processors clocked at 2,044 MHz and a memory clock of 14Gbps. It features 8GB of GDDR6 memory across a 128-bit interface. The card works with both Windows and Linux, is sold in bulk, and, somewhat unusually, it has a DisplayPort and HDMI. Ethereum miners can get 28 MH/s at its default TGP of 100W and up to 30 MH/s@60W with tuned settings.

The GPRO X080 is priced at 750 Euros ($851), and the GPRO X060 is 550 Euros ($624).

Unlike Nvidia with its LHR and CMP cards, AMD has done little to address the problem of miners snapping up what few graphics cards are left. It was even forced to deny that it prioritizes its products for miners at the expense of gamers. Board partners are so concerned about the bad publicity that comes from creating mining-specific cards that many sneak them out under the radar, just like XFX did with this one.