With the price of Ethereum tripling in as many months, Chinese crypto miners are finding it profitable to buy new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3000 laptops to mine the world's second-largest cryptocurrency. According to a post by user BTCer on the Chinese social media site Weibo, several images of the new RTX 3000 series laptops are hard at work taking down Ethereum.
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(Image credit: BTCer) After tripling in fair value since last November, there is currently crypto momentum in Ethereum, which, coupled with the limited stock availability of RTX 3000 desktop cards typically used in crypto, makes the new RTX 3000 mobile GPUs a profitable option for miners. It also means availability is even more limited for anyone looking to get a new RTX 3000 laptop like the Gigabyte Aero 17 (2021) or Alienware m17 (2021), at least in China. So far there haven't been many reports of laptop shortages in general, but with the RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070, RTX 3080, and RTX 3090 desktops, supply is still very short. From demand, it might just be a matter of time before the laptop. uptime starts to feel the pinch.
Cryptocurrency Mining Likely to Bite into RTX 3000 Laptop Source
The RTX 3000 laptop market may face some pressure in China, but the good news is that it's unlikely to be as bad as the desktop GPU market. As Videocardz points out, an RTX 3070 laptop isn't exactly cheap, and the profitability of mining Ethereum on dozens of new Ampere laptops is largely a function of rising cryptocurrency prices. This would make mining on a laptop much more susceptible to price fluctuations than cheaper desktop GPUs that might absorb it better. An RTX 3070 laptop might cost three times what a desktop card would, and it wouldn't be as powerful, so you couldn't make as much profit mining cryptocurrency. That is, of course, if you can find an RTX 3070 desktop card. It's easier to do in China, where many of Nvidia's production partners are based. There are more opportunities to simply buy the cards directly from the factory wholesale, but this is a challenge there as well. Hopefully this means there won't be a race for RTX 3000 series laptops outside of China. That being said, if cryptocurrency prices continue to soar, laptop availability is likely to crash harder than a digital currency sale.