Crazy, graphics cards are hard to come by, miners are eyeing laptops

When the graphics card, a weapon that gamers have always used, was suddenly used to change the financial world, the demand for gaming entertainment came head-on into conflict with the primitive impulse to make money. The battle has even escalated to the point of snatching high-end laptops!

Miners are targeting gaming laptops

The surge in cryptocurrencies has driven the continued popularity of the mining machine industry chain, and RTX series graphics cards have been snapped up by miners!

According to AMD's latest fourth quarter and full year financial report for fiscal year 2020, fourth quarter revenue was US$3.244 billion, a 948% increase from US$170 million in the same period last year.

The latest analysis from Wall Street believes that NVIDIA's revenue in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2021 (from November last year to January this year) is expected to surge 58%, which will be the strongest revenue quarter in three years.

Such impressive performance is mainly driven by the mining demand of the majority of miners. Even though the market has been hot for many months, the production capacity of manufacturers still cannot meet the demand. In such a context, the desire for graphics cards has made miners set their sights on a new target - gaming laptops!

Many notebook brand manufacturers, such as Shenzhou, Asus Tianxuan, Lenovo, etc., have launched the RTX30 series of high-end graphics card notebooks for the first time. However, where there is price difference profit, there are scalpers. With many miners paying close attention, high-end graphics card notebooks have also entered a situation where they are hard to find. The software cheating party has switched from grabbing Maotai to grabbing notebooks.

Moutai is no longer fragrant, shocking!

Judging from the current situation, some miners first disassemble the newly purchased laptops, and then reassemble the disassembled motherboards, graphics cards, etc. into mining machines for mining.

Some miners use it directly for mining.

According to a test conducted by a forum user, the mining efficiency of the RTX 3060 gaming laptop (Max-P) is about 49MH/s, which is 19% lower than the RTX 3070 desktop graphics card, but still comparable to the RTX 2080 Super.

Overall, the RTX 3060 has a video memory of 2125 MHz (equivalent to 17Gbps), a core frequency of 1567MHz, a GPU power consumption of 56 watts, and a thermal design power consumption of 105 watts for the entire card.

Some new netizens even asked, if the laptop is broken due to mining, can it still be covered by warranty? This is hilarious!

Manufacturers seek to change the situation

Faced with the surging market demand, graphics card manufacturers can no longer sit still!

On January 12, the executive vice president and chief financial officer of chip manufacturing giant Nvidia said that it is very likely that the production of cryptocurrency mining GPU graphics cards will be restarted in the future.

Compared with the Nvidia RTX 30 series, which is currently popular among miners, Nvidia prefers dedicated graphics cards called CMPs. The demand for Nvidia's gaming graphics cards is still strong, but because the supply of the RTX 30 series will remain tight until at least the end of the first quarter of 2021, restarting CMP production is undoubtedly a compromise to ease the pressure on the consumer product line.

Recently, the manufacturer MSI stated that it is preparing to produce dedicated mining cards and will launch RTX 3060 Ti dedicated mining cards, which can pay back in half a year based on the current currency price.

A few days ago, a number of new cards appeared on the certification page of the Eurasian Economic Commission, with the suffix ending in "miner", which is obviously prepared for mining. Among these graphics cards, there are two models in the MSI RTX 3060 Ti series, and AMD has two models, the RX 470 Miner and the RX 580 Miner 8GB.

The competition between gamers and miners over graphics cards is expected to ease this year.

How long can graphics cards continue to mine?

ETH 2.0 launched the beacon chain on December 1, 2020, but Ethereum core developer Justin is not optimistic about the progress of the merger plan and believes that the merger of ETH 1.0 and ETH 2.0 is unlikely to take place until 2021.

In other words, it will take at least a year for ETH to switch to the POS mechanism. If the development is delayed, this time window will be even longer.

Of course, once the development of ETH2.0 is completed, the millions of mining machines in the Ethereum network will be eliminated. Except for a small part that will flow into other currencies, most graphics card mining machines will be sold in the secondary graphics card market. This will undoubtedly be a huge loss for Ethereum miners who participated late and have not yet recovered their investment.

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