As graphics card supply slows down to a trickle and retail prices reach for the sky, miners have started shifting to unconventional resorts to keep their farms running. Numerous miners from the Asia-Pacific region, especially China and Taiwan have started mining Ethereum and other GPU-centric cryptocurrencies on gaming laptops. The reason? Simply because desktop-grade hardware isn’t available and when it is, it’s even more expensive than laptops featuring their mobile equivalents:
According to a report from DigiTimes, miners in the Asia-Pacific region including the countries of China, Taiwan, and South Korea have started buying gaming laptops powered by NVIDIA’s RTX 30 series GPUs in bulk. Keep in mind that the notebook variant of the RTX 3060 is more powerful than the desktop part, at least on paper, and beats the RTX 2080 Super in Ether mining, all the while drawing lesser power.
Furthermore, the mining nerf has only been applied to the desktop version of the RTX 3060 and not the mobile part. As already explained above, the RTX 3060 is presently going for around $1,000 on eBay. For roughly the same amount, you can buy an RTX 3060-powered laptop and a high-end Cezanne or Comet Lake processor.
Originally, the shipment of gaming notebooks was expected to drop as 2021 progressed as the impact of the COIVD-19 pandemic is brought under control. However, it seems like miners will now be filling that void, and more importantly, they’ll primarily be buying gaming notebooks, not the ultra-slim business models.
