Miners are getting custom GeForce RTX 30-based laptops

Weeks ago, reports popped up that cryptocurrency miners had turned to buying NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series laptops in bulk. Availability issues of desktop cards, as well as high pricing for the little inventory available, have made laptops a valuable target for some miners. Reports hit the web with photos of hundreds of RTX 30-based laptops mining coin.

Laptop OEMs are making cheaper mining laptops with RTX 30 series GPUs

Citing a report from DigiTimes, Tom's Hardware reports miners are having a massive impact on the gaming laptop market. Originally, laptop shipments are expected to slip quarter by quarter in 2021, but now it looks like crypto mining demand will keep volumes high;

The report notes some industrial-scale miners are in direct negotiation with laptop makers. For mining purposes, they need only a GeForce RTX 30 series GPU, and not all the other expensive components that go into a gaming laptop like a beefy CPU, a big and fast SSD, and a good screen.

This results in custom GeForce RTX 30-based mining laptops -- which further reduces the price gap between a discrete video card and the "gaming" laptop.

Some cryptocurrency miners have reportedly asked manufacturers to combine RTX 30 series graphics with budget components to further reduce that price gap. They aren’t planning to play games with the systems so why pay for other high-end parts?

A couple of months ago, mining on laptops seemed ludicrous, but given how warped the desktop GPU market is right now, it seems this activity is a lot bigger than we thought. I said it before and I will say it again: it really saddens me to see this. It's such a big waste of resources.

AMD Mobility Radeon RX 6000 on the way

Gamers (and miners) will have a bit more choice soon as new models are on the way. Together with the paperlaunch of the Radeon RX 6700 XT, AMD announced its mobile Radeon RX 6000 GPUs will hit the market soon. The firm didn't provide an exact launch date. It's believed the first RDNA2-based laptop GPUs will be based on the Navi22 chip. Supply is expected to be low.