
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.
