Cryptocurrency miners are buying new RTX Ampere laptops to get around GPU shortages

Cryptocurrency miners are buying new RTX Ampere laptops to get around GPU shortages

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Summing up: Nvidia’s new mobile RTX GPUs started to become available worldwide last week in a handful of attractive new gaming laptops. But in some regions, the launch was maimed by Ethereum miners buying them directly from the manufacturers.

The price of Ethereum quadrupled in 2020 and, after a sudden acceleration in January, exceeded its previous record in late 2017. The increase helped the cryptocurrency mining industry to experience an unfortunate revival that could lead to a repeat of the 2017 disaster. .

Normally, it is only possible to extract profitably with desktop GPUs sold alone. Pre-built systems and laptops have a higher markup and include components that are not useful to miners. But these disadvantages have been negated recently, partly because of rising crypto prices and partly because of the improved performance offered by Nvidia’s new GPU releases.

The RTX 3060 laptop GPU can match faster / more expensive GPUs from previous generations, and we must become available on cheaper laptop models than the RTX 2070 or 2080 did.

Therefore, it became profitable to mine with laptops for cheap games. Some miners in China bought shipments of new laptops and installed them in dedicated mining racks. The images below are of new laptops, possibly with RTX 3070s and internal RTX 3060s.

Mining has also become easier. A mining platform can be set up in just a few minutes with the help of simple software (evil) and informational articles (evil) from disreputable news sites. It’s so easy that you can do it anywhere, as a Chinese content creator demonstrates in this hilarious video.

If you don’t want to watch the video in Chinese, here’s a summary: she just bought a new Asus laptop with an RTX 3060 and took it to a Starbucks. Connected. He began to mine Ethereum. I brought you a coffee. Done some work. And two hours later, she has recovered the cost of coffee and goes home. It’s ridiculous.

Fortunately, laptop mining is unlikely to be profitable, except in scale in specific regions, so it should not affect global availability. But it highlights the power of cryptocurrencies.

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