Smugglers going green - Hong Kong customs seize 300 CMP GPUs

[tikker]

Disclaimer: I realise crypto and mining are controversial here at best. I'm not looking to start yet another miners bad gamers good debate in this thread. Furthermore this is only about mining cards, so for once these are of zero use to gamers anyway (for now). Let's keep discussion to the CMP lineup and how to best smuggle them into your country so you won't be the next headline shall we? (Please don't do the latter. Smuggling is, you know, illegal...)

 

Summary

We've had the silk road, now prepare for the silicon road. A suspicous fishing boat outside of Hong Kong has been found to be smuggling, among other things, 300 units of what appear to be Nvidia's new CMP GPUs.

Image credit: TVB News Channel

 

Quotes

Quote

The story seems like it came out of a movie. The Chinese authorities detected a suspicious fishing boat anchored just outside the Hong Kong International Airport. The sea smugglers were loading boxes from the fishing boat to a speedboat at 2 am. When their cover was blown, the shady men hopped on the speedboat and sped away towards mainland waters. A high-speed boat chase ensued (insert Bourne chase music), but the astute gang got away. However, the officers managed to detain the owner of the fishing boat.

Much to the authorities' surprise, there were up to 300 unidentified graphics cards inside the boxes. According to the report, the lot of tech products is valued at HK$2 million (~$257,000).

The graphics cards lack branding or stickers that can provide a clue to their origins. Given the lack of display outputs, these graphics cards are unquestionably CMP offerings. They feature a black and grey cooler with two cooling fans.

 

 

My thoughts

It looks like neither the end of the supply shortage or the mining craze are yet in sight if smugglers are joining the game. Is this the first we happened to have caught? I wonder if this will grow or how many GPUs in general have been smuggled already. I don't know if smuggled goods are cheaper for the customer than retail, but I assume so because why the hassle otherwise. If they are then I think this partly reflects the relatively poor value of Nvidia's CMP line up (e.g. >$700 for a mere 26 MH/s from the CMP30) to the point where even miners aren't really willing to pay MSRP. If they're not then it just relflects how valuable these pieces of silicon have become and how strong the FOMO is. I wonder if these units will see a price adjustment at some point. Not that a $2000 3080 is good value, but at least that one plays videogames and has a better ROI at this point in time when properly tuned (no guarantee for the future of course).

 

Also it does look like there are some display adapter cutouts on the more vertically oriented ones after all, but the picture quality makes it hard to identify for sure.

 

Sources

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-smugglers-300-nvidia-cmp-30hx-gpus

[King of Memes]

2 minutes ago, tikker said:

Disclaimer: I realise crypto and mining are controversial here at best. I'm not looking to start yet another miners bad gamers good debate in this thread. Furthermore this is only about mining cards, so for once these are of zero use to gamers anyway (for now). Let's keep discussion to the CMP lineup and how to best smuggle them into your country so you won't be the next headline shall we? (Please don't do the latter. Smuggling is, you know, illegal...)

 

Summary

We've had the silk road, now prepare for the silicon road. A suspicous fishing boat outside of Hong Kong has been found to be smuggling, among other things, 300 units of what appear to be Nvidia's new CMP GPUs.

Image credit: TVB News Channel

 

Quotes

 

 

My thoughts

It looks like neither the end of the supply shortage or the mining craze are yet in sight if smugglers are joining the game. Is this the first we happened to have caught? I wonder if this will grow or how many GPUs in general have been smuggled already. I don't know if smuggled goods are cheaper for the customer than retail, but I assume so because why the hassle otherwise. If they are then I think this partly reflects the relatively poor value of Nvidia's CMP line up (e.g. >$700 for a mere 26 MH/s from the CMP30) to the point where even miners aren't really willing to pay MSRP. If they're not then it just relflects how valuable these pieces of silicon have become and how strong the FOMO is. I wonder if these units will see a price adjustment at some point. Not that a $2000 3080 is good value, but at least that one plays videogames and has a better ROI at this point in time when properly tuned (no guarantee for the future of course).

 

Also it does look like there are some display adapter cutouts on the more vertically oriented ones after all, but the picture quality makes it hard to identify for sure.

 

Sources

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-smugglers-300-nvidia-cmp-30hx-gpus

wow, what is the world coming to?

[arnavvr]

Even if the price of Ethereum keeps going up, I think that the miners getting into the game now have a steep hill to climb, as returns will eventually slow down as the difficulty continues to rise.

 

So no, a $2000 3080 will most likely not ROI.

[tikker]

3 minutes ago, arnavvr said:

So no, a $2000 3080 will most likely not ROI.

True, it's still a long time to hit ROI, assuming the bull market keeps going a bit still, and huge gamble investing that kind of money in short term pure mining equipment at this point. My advice in that regards has therefore also been to just buy instead if you really want to put some money in.

[TetraSky]

They used to smuggle drugs. Now they smuggle mining cards...

There's a joke here somewhere.

[arnavvr]

3 minutes ago, tikker said:

True, it's still a long time to hit ROI, assuming the bull market keeps going a bit still, and huge gamble investing that kind of money in short term pure mining equipment at this point. My advice in that regards has therefore also been to just buy instead if you really want to put some money in.

$2000 will buy you one ETH today. It will take approximately ~ 7 months to mine one ether at the current difficulty, which will only keep going up. Personally, I would just buy the coins.

[Brooksie359]

Good on them. Miners are a threat to the environment so they should be stopped at all cost. At least these miners are dumb enough to smuggle the cards in giving them a reason to stop them. 

[Guest]

Quote

300 unidentified graphics cards

These are probably a stock of those fake ass cards you see on E-bay thinking it's a 1660s but really is a GT 710. lol.

 

Quote

valued at HK$2 million (~$257,000).

And how the fuck did they come up with that number from feed water from a blown tank. They don't even know what the GPUs even really are lol.

[tikker]

3 minutes ago, ShrimpBrime said:

These are probably a stock of those fake ass cards you see on E-bay thinking it's a 1660s but really is a GT 710. lol.

 

And how the fuck did they come up with that number from feed water from a blown tank. They don't even know what the GPUs even really are lol.

Haha maybe. That dollar number is in line with the $700-800 for a CMP30: https://global.microless.com/product/mining-nvidia-geforce-cmp-30hx-graphics-card-dedicated-specifically-for-mining-6gb-gddr6-192-bits-14-gbps-hash-rate-26-mh-s-mem-bandwidth-336-gb-sec-ne630hx017j9-1160x/

2 hours ago, arnavvr said:

$2000 will buy you one ETH today. It will take approximately ~ 7 months to mine one ether at the current difficulty, which will only keep going up. Personally, I would just buy the coins.

Exactly my reasoning.

2 hours ago, TetraSky said:

They used to smuggle drugs. Now they smuggle mining cards...

There's a joke here somewhere.

Reported to customs for smuggling jokes.

[Guest]

1 minute ago, tikker said:

Haha maybe. That dollar number is in line with the $700-800 for a CMP30: https://global.microless.com/product/mining-nvidia-geforce-cmp-30hx-graphics-card-dedicated-specifically-for-mining-6gb-gddr6-192-bits-14-gbps-hash-rate-26-mh-s-mem-bandwidth-336-gb-sec-ne630hx017j9-1160x/

Exactly my reasoning.

It's nothing so far.

 

Until one of you plug in the "unbranded card" and pull the bios, you have no clue what it is.

 

Located in the place infamous for bullshit like this no less..... 

[porina]

35 minutes ago, tikker said:

Haha maybe. That dollar number is in line with the $700-800 for a CMP30: https://global.microless.com/product/mining-nvidia-geforce-cmp-30hx-graphics-card-dedicated-specifically-for-mining-6gb-gddr6-192-bits-14-gbps-hash-rate-26-mh-s-mem-bandwidth-336-gb-sec-ne630hx017j9-1160x/

You can be sure the big miners are NOT paying anywhere near that price for those cards. Nvidia mining cards are not retail products. That this single seller managed to get some to try and flip retail is not indicative of real pricing.

[Quackers101]

Thats some hardcore dr*gs.

Not fake?

Also dont smuggle fake vaccines either, or the newest problem with a lot of johnsen and johnsen vaccine (very small number of bad batches got out assumingly)

[Kisai]

9 hours ago, porina said:

You can be sure the big miners are NOT paying anywhere near that price for those cards. Nvidia mining cards are not retail products. That this single seller managed to get some to try and flip retail is not indicative of real pricing.

So the other day, I was looking for a site that is actually selling gpu's, and I stumbled accross.... a site selling them for mining. The prices were more than 30% markup from retail. I don't remember the site, but searching now brings up DIY etsy mining rigs which are 200% markup and I'm just wondering how much of this is scalping.

 

Trying to buy a prebuild, only RTX 3070's are available (2 week orders), where as all other cards are 6 weeks orders

 

Which likely explains this:

https://technosports.co.in/2021/04/05/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3070-becomes-steams-fastest-growing-gpu/

Quote

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 becomes Steam’s fastest-growing GPU

 

The 3070 is the only GPU I've been seeing in any system. 

[Arika]

13 hours ago, TetraSky said:

They used to smuggle drugs. Now they smuggle mining cards...

There's a joke here somewhere.

Drugs are probably cheaper 

[Quackers101]

when they mix it up the heavy stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpBI545k5sA

 

[StDragon]

5 hours ago, Arika S said:

Drugs are probably cheaper 

Somewhere, a mafia boss is crying.