Graphics card marked for mining at Wootware?

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newby_investor

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Background: I'm in the market for an AMD graphics card to go with my new build. The nominal intended use is for video-editing (the wife is the creative type), and I have delusions of being able to learn some OpenCL-type development. Occasionally some gaming but it's so casual as to be not worth mentioning as a driving requirement, on-board graphics on a laptop could handle it.

On Wootware there are a few Radeon cards which are specifically labelled as for cryptocurrency mining, such as:
https://www.wootware.co.za/gigabyte...t-pci-e-3-0-desktop-mining-graphics-card.html
https://www.wootware.co.za/gigabyte...-3-0-cryptocurrency-mining-graphics-card.html

Is this just Wootware trying to sell cards to blockchain enthusiasts? Or is there something specific about these cards that would make them either more or less desirable to my use case? They seem to have the right outputs to drive a screen at a suitably high resolution, so they're not just compute units. If I follow the link to the manufacturer's site, it doesn't contain the same nomenclature, looks like just a normal gaming graphics card, but I thought I'd ask if anyone knows.
 
A workstation one would be nice, but they are moderately expensive. Even the older-generation FirePro costs a good 2k more than a high-end RX580. As far as I know, they're also optimised differently from gaming cards, though I'm no expert here. (Tried gaming on a colleague's machine with a Quadro, for example, doesn't work too well, even though it does CAD far better than another similarly-specced machine with a GeForce.)

The main use driving the purchase is video editing, as far as I know a gaming card should be fine to have a smooth workflow and reasonable rendering times. The content creation is more of a serious hobby than a profession.

From the OpenCL point of view - if I get to the point that serious power is required, that can be offloaded to a cloud provider at a very reasonable cost. Having a semi-decent GPU at home would just be for the purposes of learning and testing.
 
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