Chinese crypto miners turn attention to GeForce RTX 30 laptops

Over the past couple of months, the value of Ethereum has tripled. Unfortunately, this new cryptocurrency boom is sparking another mining frenzy right at the same that video card supply is already constrainted. VideoCardz reports Chinese miners are now even buying laptops with GeForce RTX 30 graphics cards in bulk because of limited GPU supply.

The laptop example is just crazy. Apparently mining Ethereum is now so profitable that folks are stacking laptops on shelves to mine cryptocurrency:

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. Let alone, why is even GPU mining possible on laptop GPUs in the first place. This of course, along with Chinese New Year, will likely affect the availability of RTX 30 laptops.

Chinese miners are crazy ???????? https://t.co/yOA1wC5U3a pic.twitter.com/EvQccY6DHG

— I_Leak_VN (@I_Leak_VN) February 6, 2021

Furthermore, the site also heard that miners are making direct deals with NVIDIA's add-in board partners to buy video cards in bulk. Some of NVIDIA's partners reportedly agree to this because miners pay more (typically 1/3rd more than any distributor) and don't need the same warranty as retail clients.