Finding an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 – or pretty much any other modern graphics card – seemed impossible in 2021, especially for anyone looking to buy a new GPU at an MSRP. Of course, we already knew that cryptocurrency miners were partly responsible for these problems, but a tour of a full-time mining operation makes the sheer number of graphics cards dedicated to mining clearer than ever.
The walkthrough in question was presented by Jaxson Davidson, the self-described “full-time crypto miner, 4-year crypto veteran, macro investor” and “advocate of all things crypto, guns and freedom”, in a Twitter video posted Tuesday divided . Here is the video showing just one of the four buildings Davidson dedicated to his operation:
Here’s a look inside building 1/4 of my mining farm. Almost all of the 3070s in this building. My new building will be all 170hx cards. I hope EOY has it ready. #ETH #RVN #mining pic.twitter.com/ZSgYBgCwKLD15. December 2021
For anyone looking for an RTX 3070 – one of the best graphics cards for gaming in 2021 – Davidson’s video could feel like pouring salt on a wound. We suggest applying a metaphorical ointment by watching this video where the police run over $ 1.6 million in mining equipment. Or, if you’re the “eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” type, you can be confident that Davidson will move on from RTX 3070s (although we spotted some AMD Radeon reference cards in the video as well).
If you watch the video, there are six rows of mining rigs, most of which appear to have 10-12 racks, each rack with four stacks of eight GPUs. Do the math and that’s somewhere near 2,000 graphics cards. Davidson can have up to 8,000 GPUs at four locations, all of which toil in the mines. Of course, so many GPUs are only a fraction of the market, but there are a lot more Davidsons out there.
“I’ve bought from a number of small businesses across the county,” replied Davidson when asked how he got so many RTX 3070s given the ongoing GPU shortage. “But I was able to close a deal directly with Nvidia for 170hx cards. In the future I will only build rigs with them.”
Davidson was referring to a member of the Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP) range that Nvidia launched in February to appease gamers and miners alike. The CMP 170HX is a GA100-equipped mining GPU with 4,480 CUDA cores that can achieve an Ethereum mining performance of 165 MHps with a TDP of 250 W. But that feat has its price – a retailer in Dubai listed the CMP 170HX at $ 4,300 in October. However, how much will Nvidia be charging the likes of Davidson? That is the question we were happy to answer.
Anyway, a significant number of RTX 3070’s appear to be naming a mining farm in Utah dedicated to Ethereum and Ravencoin. But at least Davidson wants to move on to mining-oriented GPUs instead of using consumer-grade cards in the future. And, hey, at least the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade will eventually remove one of the more lucrative cryptocurrencies from the mining market. Right?
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