Not you too! - Miners looking towards gaming laptops powered by NVIDIA's Ampere GPUs for Ethereum

[D13H4RD]

Summary

In what should really surprise very little at this point, owing to a shortage of GeForce RTX 30-series desktop cards, miners, notably those in China, have started to turn their attention towards newly released laptops with NVIDIA's shiny new GPU architecture, notably for mining Ethereum, which has seen a significant value jump that now sits around the $1600-1700 mark. Given the sheer compute power of NVIDIA's Ampere architecture, even notebook GPUs have proven to be lucrative for cryptomining, even to the point of using it to mine whilst in a coffee shop, making enough to pay for the coffee itself.

 

Quotes

Quote

In China, a new way of mining is slowly becoming popular. The latest GeForce RTX 30 laptops have only just launched earlier this month, which certainly did not go unnoticed by GPU miners. Apparently, people are now mass buying laptops with graphics cards such as RTX 3070 to literally stack them on the shelves to mine Ethereum. The price of the RTX 3070 laptop isn’t the lowest, which means that miners are paying more and still making a profit. It just seems surreal that NVIDIA has not enforced any rules that would prevent such a thing.

Quote

A content creator in China has already demonstrated how easy it was to mine Ethereum on an RTX 3060-powered laptop by casually earning enough money in a coffee shop to pay for their beverage and not incur any power bills

Coupled with the incoming Chinese New Year holiday period, if this gains more attention and traction amongst miners, it may be the case that new gaming laptops may also suffer from the supply and price-gouging issues that many desktop parts, notably those from AMD and NVIDIA, have suffered from over the past few months.

 

My thoughts

It definitely looks like a pretty bad time to be in the market for any product that utilizes AMD's Zen 3 and RDNA2 architecture alongside NVIDIA's Ampere. With supply chains still reeling from the effect of COVID-19, and now coupled with increasing mining interests (again) plus the typical issues with scalping and price-gouging from retailers, it looks like many of us who either want to build a new system or upgrade an existing one will have to hold out much longer.

 

Sources

Notebookcheck

Videocardz

[lewdicrous]

You want a room that sounds like the inside of a jet engine? Well you're in luck!!

[CommanderAlex]

2 minutes ago, D13H4RD said:

it looks like many of us who either want to build a new system or upgrade an existing one will have to hold out.

That's unfortunately the case here...what a joke this has become trying to get new hardware. 

[D13H4RD]

2 minutes ago, SpiderMan said:

That's unfortunately the case here...what a joke this has become trying to get new hardware. 

Indeed it has. So much so that it would actually be better to just buy a PS5 if and when you can find one that's not price-gouged to hell.

[CephDigital]

Well rip, looks like I wont be buying a new laptop in April then...

[D13H4RD]

5 minutes ago, WikiForce said:

if this succeeds and happens on large scale then it might be much worse for us gamers in near future

I'm honestly not really sure if it will succeed, let alone happen on a large scale.

 

But if it does indeed gain even a little bit of traction, given that Ampere cards and Zen 3 are already on tight supply, they'll be even tighter, especially for those machines powered by a Ryzen 5000 APU paired with a GeForce RTX 30 GPU.

[Applefreak]

17 minutes ago, D13H4RD said:

Summary

In what should really surprise very little at this point, owing to a shortage of GeForce RTX 30-series desktop cards, miners, notably those in China, have started to turn their attention towards newly released laptops with NVIDIA's shiny new GPU architecture, notably for mining Ethereum, which has seen a significant value jump that now sits around the $1600-1700 mark. Given the sheer compute power of NVIDIA's Ampere architecture, even notebook GPUs have proven to be lucrative for cryptomining, even to the point of using it to mine whilst in a coffee shop, making enough to pay for the coffee itself.

 

Quotes

Coupled with the incoming Chinese New Year holiday period, if this gains more attention and traction amongst miners, it may be the case that new gaming laptops may also suffer from the supply and price-gouging issues that many desktop parts, notably those from AMD and NVIDIA, have suffered from over the past few months.

 

My thoughts

It definitely looks like a pretty bad time to be in the market for any product that utilizes AMD's Zen 3 and RDNA2 architecture alongside NVIDIA's Ampere. With supply chains still reeling from the effect of COVID-19, and now coupled with increasing mining interests (again) plus the typical issues with scalping and price-gouging from retailers, it looks like many of us who either want to build a new system or upgrade an existing one will have to hold out much longer.

 

Sources

Notebookcheck

Videocardz

Stacking laptops and power bricks like that is a sure way to burn down the mining warehouse sooner or later. A win-win for the rest of the world, just bad for the environment. If miners want to buy crappy overpriced gaming laptops, let them. No one in their right mind should spend thousands on a laptop unless it is the only computer they can have, even then, you are overpaying for the cut down components inside. I like the idea of miners getting poor buying MSI, ASUS etc. that will burn out faster than they can replace them. Let's hope the manufacturers won't agree to cover them under warranty. 

[ZuppaSalata]

1 hour ago, D13H4RD said:

Indeed it has. So much so that it would actually be better to just buy a PS5 if and when you can find one that's not price-gouged to hell.

well... people discovered that it is possible to mine ethereum on ps5 and xbox series x with really good results. 

With the actual ethereum mining rates even a smart fridge could be profitable

[Zodiark1593]

1 hour ago, Applefreak said:

Stacking laptops and power bricks like that is a sure way to burn down the mining warehouse sooner or later. A win-win for the rest of the world, just bad for the environment. If miners want to buy crappy overpriced gaming laptops, let them. No one in their right mind should spend thousands on a laptop unless it is the only computer they can have, even then, you are overpaying for the cut down components inside. I like the idea of miners getting poor buying MSI, ASUS etc. that will burn out faster than they can replace them. Let's hope the manufacturers won't agree to cover them under warranty. 

I don’t think manufacturers can just tell their customers to eff off when it comes to warranty. Cryptomining is a compute intensive task like any other (such as Blender, Premiere, etc), and once a drive is imaged, there would be no evidence of a cryptominer having been installed anyway. 
 

That said, if the cryptomining craze and heavy scalping continues for years, I fear this may actually be what kills PC gaming in earnest. There’s literally no point releasing ray-trace heavy games on PC if gamers can’t actually get the cards in hand.

[Applefreak]

8 minutes ago, Zodiark1593 said:

I don’t think manufacturers can just tell their customers to eff off when it comes to warranty. Cryptomining is a compute intensive task like any other (such as Blender, Premiere, etc), and once a drive is imaged, there would be no evidence of a cryptominer having been installed anyway. 
 

That said, if the cryptomining craze and heavy scalping continues for years, I fear this may actually be what kills PC gaming in earnest. There’s literally no point releasing ray-trace heavy games on PC if gamers can’t actually get the cards in hand.

I agree. However I would like to point out that RTX in mainstream cards is to reduce to overall complexity of creating different silicons for enterprise and consumer cards. In enterprise environments, the RTX part of the card is vital when it comes to certain industrial applications. It still is more of a gimmick on consumer cards, less so on the 30 series but unless even low end cards can make use of it like with AA and AF for example, it remains less important in the development of games in general. What drives me crazy is that the only card currently available (on pre-order that is) are 3070 and 3090 cards. 

I wanted to upgrade to ZEN 3 and a RTX or RX card but as it stands, my plans have been pushed back probably into July or even later. 

[Heliian]

Yay!  

 

Here's to hoping governments start regulating this crap.  India is at least attempting to put pressure on it.

 

Crypto currency is the biggest waste of resources, just think how much scientific computing could have been accomplished with all that hardware churning. 

[jagdtigger]

Cant wait until pissed off gamers will start to blow crypto sites to high heavens with LOIC.....    One thing is sure, the sooner crypto gets killed is the better for everyone.

[C2dan88]

Rolls eyes.

[Justaphysicsnerd]

6 hours ago, D13H4RD said:

Summary

In what should really surprise very little at this point, owing to a shortage of GeForce RTX 30-series desktop cards, miners, notably those in China, have started to turn their attention towards newly released laptops with NVIDIA's shiny new GPU architecture, notably for mining Ethereum, which has seen a significant value jump that now sits around the $1600-1700 mark. Given the sheer compute power of NVIDIA's Ampere architecture, even notebook GPUs have proven to be lucrative for cryptomining, even to the point of using it to mine whilst in a coffee shop, making enough to pay for the coffee itself.

 

Quotes

Coupled with the incoming Chinese New Year holiday period, if this gains more attention and traction amongst miners, it may be the case that new gaming laptops may also suffer from the supply and price-gouging issues that many desktop parts, notably those from AMD and NVIDIA, have suffered from over the past few months.

 

My thoughts

It definitely looks like a pretty bad time to be in the market for any product that utilizes AMD's Zen 3 and RDNA2 architecture alongside NVIDIA's Ampere. With supply chains still reeling from the effect of COVID-19, and now coupled with increasing mining interests (again) plus the typical issues with scalping and price-gouging from retailers, it looks like many of us who either want to build a new system or upgrade an existing one will have to hold out much longer.

 

Sources

Notebookcheck

Videocardz

This sh*t's gettin pretty serious BOIS

[Donut417]

3 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Cant wait until pissed off gamers will start to blow crypto sites to high heavens with LOIC.....    One thing is sure, the sooner crypto gets killed is the better for everyone.

Im surprised that gamers haven't started bitching to the government. If anyone is going to hurt the miners its the government with all kinds of regulations. 

[Beskamir]

8 hours ago, Heliian said:

Yay!  

 

Here's to hoping governments start regulating this crap.  India is at least attempting to put pressure on it.

 

Crypto currency is the biggest waste of resources, just think how much scientific computing could have been accomplished with all that hardware churning. 

The thing is that cryptocurrencies enable distributed scientific computation... For instance the Golem network (https://golem.network/) is essentially a distributed compute cluster that's currently only capable of Blender rendering but hopes to expand to modeling molecules.

 

That said, proof of work cryptocurrencies are indeed incredibly wasteful and I'm looking forward to Ethereum 2.0 that'll be proof of stake instead. Although an issue with proof of stake is that everyone's further incentivized to hoard all their crypto making it even more of an "investment" and less of an actual currency than it already is . Ugh. It'd be nice if there was a digital currency that didn't require or encourage computation or hoarding so they can be used as actual currencies without wasting resources.

[leadeater]

46 minutes ago, Beskamir said:

The thing is that cryptocurrencies enable distributed scientific computation... For instance the Golem network (https://golem.network/) is essentially a distributed compute cluster that's currently only capable of Blender rendering but hopes to expand to modeling molecules.

SETI@Home (1999), Folding@Home (2000), BOINC (2002) etc etc all disagree. Cryptocurrencies came after distributed computing not before.

[TetraSky]

Jeez.... Crypto miners are a special kind of people.

[TetraSky]

10 hours ago, Heliian said:

Crypto currency is the biggest waste of resources, just think how much scientific computing could have been accomplished with all that hardware churning. 

Or how much fossil fuel was burned to power all that hardware.

 

edit: aw shit, ended up double posting instead of editing...

[AngryBeaver]

10 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Cant wait until pissed off gamers will start to blow crypto sites to high heavens with LOIC.....    One thing is sure, the sooner crypto gets killed is the better for everyone.

I think that ship has already sailed. We are past the point of it just dying and going away. So we are already past the event horizon and are doomed to watch how crypto evolves going forward. Heck, I have been mining again with just my gaming pc when I am not playing on it which has already netted me about .60ish of a coin. I doubt I will even sell any time soon. I mean as it stands this gpu will pay for itself in about 2 months

[The1Dickens]

Welp... guess I just have to go full Bon Jovi and be 'Livin' On A Prayer' that my 1080Ti doesn't die before 5000 series GPUs come out so I can probably hopefully afford a tail-end stock of 4000 series stuff... Maybe 4 years?

[Moonzy]

I called it lmfao

 

 

[Zodiark1593]

25 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

I called it lmfao

 

 

Yeah, that comment aged rather poorly. 
 

Perhaps Apple can seize the opportunity, incorporate ray-trace hardware onto their SoCs, and pretty much corner the PC gaming market.

 

[Jet_ski]

Maybe this whole Bitcoin and cryptocurrency thing was started by Nvidia to sell GPUs.

[DrMacintosh]

Imagine letting a group of people become rich as long as enough of them come together and believe that they are rich. Something has to give. If it were up to me I would have governments declare crypto currency a danger to national security (bc crypto directly threatens legal tender of every nation) and ban its use. That or slap a 50% tax on it so nobody wants to use it.