Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 mobile GPUs, initially intended for laptops, were installed in unauthorized graphics cards and marketed to cryptominers as a way to circumvent Nvidia's Light Hash Rate GPUs in standard desktop graphics cards.
According to Tom's Hardware, these GPUs have been specifically modified from their initial mobile form factor GPUs to desktop form factor graphics cards. They were first discovered by Twitter leaker I_Leak_VN, who found them on Chinese online marketplace Taobao and leaked the mining performance graph of these malicious cards. VideoCardz even shared photos of the graphics cards being prepared for shipment.
Although the mobile RTX 3070 lacks the power and clock speed of the desktop version (the mobile RTX 3070 only has 5120 CUDA cores compared to the desktop version's 5888, and the clock boost mobile GPU reaches 1,56 GHz, compared to 1,73 GHz for the RTX 3070 desktop graphics card), is not aimed at gamers. The mobile version lacks the Light Hash Rate technology that Nvidia desktop cards have, making mobile GPUs perfect for crypto mining.
We reached out to Nvidia for comment, but the company said it couldn't comment on unauthorized products.
Analysis: The Negative Effects of Crypto Mining on Gaming
The issue of reusing mobile GPUs as desktop mining tools has been going on for over a year. And Nvidia didn't seem to crack down on the problem.
That means fewer RTX 3000-series mobile GPUs made their way into laptops as they should. With Taobao listings showing hundreds of GPUs for sale, that means there are hundreds fewer creative and gaming laptops than would exist otherwise. This makes 3070 laptops and even 3060 laptops much more expensive due to limited supply.
Coupled with the general shortage of semiconductors around the world, this makes it even more difficult for gamers to acquire gaming PC or laptop parts, so the sooner Nvidia cracks down on this gray market, the better, though it's the damage may already have been done.