Chinese Miners Using RTX 30-Series Laptops for Mining Power

RTX 30 Series Laptops Ethereum Mining
(Image credit: Weibo)

Over this past week, Ethereum has skyrocketed to nearly $1700 in value (at the time of writing), making Ethereum very profitable to mine once again. But due to the shortage in graphics card supplies right now, desperate Chinese miners are apparently turning to RTX 30 series laptops as a new way to mine the cryptocurrency, as shown in a series of images that depict a laptop mining farm. 

It's unclear from the images and description if the miner purchased the laptops specifically for mining ethereum or is just repurposing laptops from a company or school, like an internet cafe, while they would otherwise be idle. 

In another demonstration of how valuable Ethereum has become, a vlogger posted on Bilibili that she went to a local Starbucks in China with an RTX 3060 laptop (TDP unknown), and showcased showed her payout from mining Ethereum for just two hours. She claims that her RTX 3060 mobile with a hefty memory overclock of +1000MHz managed an average hashing rate of 46MH/s. After two hours, she claims she made $0.9 USD. That might not sound like much, but it was enough for her to buy a coffee at Starbucks.

Now stack dozens or even hundreds of these laptops together and have them mining 24/7, and you can get an idea of why Chinese miners are so eager to push any Ampere laptop they can find into mining service.

Unfortunately, if prices for cryptocurrencies like Ethereum continue to climb, miners will be back in full swing and ordering as much compute power as they can. Now that getting graphics cards is nearly impossible for your average gamer or miner, it leaves miners no choice but to look for alternative methods to mine coins. 

Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

  • Phaaze88
    OMG, so much potential e-waste...
    Reply
  • Co BIY
    Someone needs to code a cryptocurrency that doesn't require continually escalating cryptography but can still function as a Ponzi scheme for the founders and an anonymous currency for criminals or victims of financially oppressive regimes (perspective I suppose).

    Crypto with steady value and environmentally friendly. (the founder of course would still become obscenely stealthily wealthy)

    It would save electricity and gaming cards.

    Wait that's a horrible idea, never mind ...(rushes to secret lab )
    Reply
  • Chung Leong
    Why bother mining when you can make more money producing fake news fueling an asset bubble? Ethereum is up something like 500% ever since Tom's Hardware and other tech outlets began pushing this bogus narrative.
    Reply
  • Phaaze88
    :openmouth:
    Reply
  • gg83
    we need to outlaw mining just for the environmental impact! let alone the energy burnt!
    Reply
  • zodiacfml
    More money than sense. I make more money trading crypto than my GPU mining rigs. The cost of those laptops probably easily exceeds the capital I use for trading.


    Admin said:
    Chinese Miners are using RTX 30-series gaming laptops for cryptomining.

    Chinese Miners Using RTX 30-Series Laptops for Mining Power : Read more
    Admin said:
    Chinese Miners are using RTX 30-series gaming laptops for cryptomining.

    Chinese Miners Using RTX 30-Series Laptops for Mining Power : Read more
    Reply
  • SethNW
    Miners pretty much are back in full swing, if they are desperate enough to buy laptops, doesn't matter if you want to live in denial. Plus further proof of that are increased prices of used cards too, unless they are crappy for mining. Like laptops aren't even nearly as great as graphic cards, but when they can't get those, laptops are like last resort. And even RDNA2 isn't safe, considering that miners are expending to les desired options. Do I guess we will be left with either not upgrading or consoles. Provided someone doesn't find a way to mine on consoles, which they no doubt would, if they could.

    And funny enough, nVidia was changing their architecture to cater to mining, do they wouldn't have another boom with Radeon being better, hence why Ampere is compute heavy and not as good at higher FPSs at below 4k as Radeon which us gaming optimized architecture, like Pascal used to be.

    But all those companies will have to figure something out, with all those supply issues, it will start killing PC market, as people decide they don't want yo deal with this and just get consoles. Though how to do it is another question, since mining uses typical GPU instruction sets, they don't use anything special you can disable and not effect gaming side.
    Reply
  • g-unit1111
    SethNW said:
    Miners pretty much are back in full swing, if they are desperate enough to buy laptops, doesn't matter if you want to live in denial. Plus further proof of that are increased prices of used cards too, unless they are crappy for mining. Like laptops aren't even nearly as great as graphic cards, but when they can't get those, laptops are like last resort. And even RDNA2 isn't safe, considering that miners are expending to les desired options. Do I guess we will be left with either not upgrading or consoles. Provided someone doesn't find a way to mine on consoles, which they no doubt would, if they could.

    At least it's not translating into a shortage of laptops the way it is with GPUs. I just checked Newegg and they have plenty of 3XXX laptops in stock from all major manufacturers. For now.
    Reply
  • motocros1
    i thought asic's took over for mining? i took a quick peak on ebay and there are thousands of cheap asics, am i missing something?
    Reply
  • Giroro
    Why is mining even still a thing? Crypto currency has zero intrinsic value, even in the abstract. Every dollar a miner gains from crypto is a dollar some rube got scammed into spending on an imaginary number typed into the display of a calculator.
    It's like when a gambling addict spends their life savings on a f2p game, except without the payoff of an upbeat jingle and a colorful .jpg to look at.
    Dummies keep putting their money into a system where only the 1% even have the slightest idea how to cash out. It's a one way exchange. The most annoying people in the world will take your money, and all you get is a difficult way to make a few pixels black on a computer screen.
    Reply