Conspiracy theory time...
So, there has been some testing on the Frontier Edition which has shown it to be a fairly competent mining card, but so far testing on the release RX versions has shown that they are pretty meh at mining for the price. Then there is the GamerNexus review that Fluffy_Hedgehog mentioned that shows modding and clocking lowers power usage and increases performance of the 56... so... what if AMD gimped them to get them into the hands of gamers? They make them unpalatable to miners to keep them out of their hands. Fast forward to the decline of this mining craze and AMD sends a BIOS flash and driver update to release the cards to their intended performance with lower power usage and higher performance.
Crazy? Yeah, I know. That is why I call it a conspiracy theory.
So, there has been some testing on the Frontier Edition which has shown it to be a fairly competent mining card, but so far testing on the release RX versions has shown that they are pretty meh at mining for the price. Then there is the GamerNexus review that Fluffy_Hedgehog mentioned that shows modding and clocking lowers power usage and increases performance of the 56... so... what if AMD gimped them to get them into the hands of gamers? They make them unpalatable to miners to keep them out of their hands. Fast forward to the decline of this mining craze and AMD sends a BIOS flash and driver update to release the cards to their intended performance with lower power usage and higher performance.
Crazy? Yeah, I know. That is why I call it a conspiracy theory.