MSI endorses crypto mining on its gaming laptops

Oh boy. Last month Zotac received a lot of flack for endorsing cryptocurrency mining via the firm's Twitter handle. The company retweeted a photo of a mining operation with at least eight ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3070 series video cards -- an action that angered a lot of gamers because it's really hard right now to find video cards at a decent price.

MSI blog promotes mining on laptops

Now it turns out MSI did almost exactly the same thing. In a February 25 blog post that went largely unnoticed, MSI hypes up the cryptocurrency mining potential of its gaming laptops. As VideoCardz points out, this doesn't seem like a smart marketing move at a time when products are affected by big shortages.

Due to the lack of sufficient discrete video cars, miners have recently started turning to buying gaming laptops in bulk. This costs a bit more, but apparently, it's deemed profitable enough to mine coin on GeForce RTX 30 series laptops. In fact, there are even reports about miners cutting deals with laptops makers to get custom, cheaper "gaming" laptops that only feature the parts they really need.



The blog post from MSI explores the crypto mining potential of the MSI GE76 Raider gaming laptop. This laptop features the mobile GeForce RTX 3080 laptop GPU. According to MSI, the GE76 Raider can hit an Ethereum hash rate of 52.8MH/s, which makes it roughly on-par with the GeForce RTX 3070 desktop video card:

On a simple level, hash rate is the way we measure how much computing power everyone around the world is contributing toward mining. The below hash rate chart shows several desktop GPUs and GE76. Although MSI GE76 may not be the most cost-efficiency mining option, it shows comparable performance to a desktop RTX 3070. -- MSI

MSI promises a follow up post about the mining experiment will be posted towards the end of this month.