Images have surfaced on China’s Baidu forums showing crypto-miners hoarding NVIDIA’s new GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards in the dozens. Considering that the launch date is still several days away, it’s a surprise that these miners were able to get their hands on so many units:
Update: The first two images were from retailers (misleading). Removed. Sorry :/
Update 2: Turns out that this is Inno3D’s testing lab, not a mining farm 🙂
In the above image, you can see a mining farm using up to 8 GeForce RTX 3080 cards, possibly the iChill variant from Inno3D. As per the miners, the RTX 3080 is nearly 3-4x faster than the RTX 2080 in terms of Ethereum mining capabilities. You’re looking at 115 Mh/s, while the RTX 2080 manages just about 30-40 Mh/s.
This is a bit worrying as the Ampere GPUs are already supposed to be limited in supply for the first couple of months. Both Ethereum and Bitcoin prices have seen a revival over the past 6 months. At present, Eth is trading at $347 while Bitcoin is placed north of the 10K mark at $10,174. It’ll be really unfortunate if like the last mining boom, consumer graphics cards are cannibalized by miners.
