[A Las Vegas-based cryptocurrency miner has apparently managed to procure dozens of PNY-branded GeForce RTX 3080 cards to mine Ethereum. How on earth he managed to acquire so many cards is beyond me, but even if he paid used prices, he should be able to make a profit by the end of next year.

Nvidia kicked off its consumer division's ampere party with the GeForce RTX 3080, which was released on September 17 for a suggested retail price of $699. And by "launched for retail," we mean that it was available for just a brief moment before it was sold out everywhere. Since then, Nvidia has released three more models - the GeForce RTX 3090 ($1,499), GeForce RTX 3070 ($499), and GeForce RTX 3060 Ti ($399) - which also sold out instantly.

This has frustrated PC gamers who need or want an upgrade. Further compounding the anger is the fact that consumers are dealing with scripted bots, making it even more difficult to actually purchase GeForce RTX 30 series cards (or AMD Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs or Ryzen 5000 series CPUs) at normal prices.

Cryptocurrencies.

Throw cryptocurrency mining into the mix and, well, who would really be surprised? According to TechArp, a guy named Simon Byrne has 78 GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards neatly arranged in an open rack, mining Ethereum He is mining Ethereum. In other words, unless the photo has been Photoshopped, we have not been able to track down this Simon Byrne person, so this could be bullshit, as well as the alleged lost shipment of 500,000 GeForce RTX 30 series cards.

But if this is a real operation, Simon Byrne stands to profit handsomely; TechArp crunched some numbers. Suppose he paid a used sales price of $1,199 per card. That comes to $93,522, which can be further rounded up to $100,000 after factoring in the cost of the power supply unit and enclosure rack.

The average electricity rate for a commercial customer in Las Vegas is 8.43 cents per kWh. This comes to $1,444 per month. If this is increased by 50% to $2,166, the cost of AC cooling must be taken into account. This means that over the course of a year, you would pay $25,992 in electricity and cooling costs. Adding the cost of the hardware, the outlay for the first year would be $125,992

Now let's move on to the mining volume. The hash rate for each card is 83.57 MH/s. This means that approximately $165 worth of Ethereum (0.22236870 ETH) is mined each month. Multiplying this by 78 yields 17.3447586 ETH, which is equivalent to $12,840 per month or $154,080 per year.

Based on this calculation, Simon Byrne and his 78 GPUs would earn $28,088 in the first year and $125,088 annually thereafter (unless I made a mistake in my calculations somewhere).

Of course, this assumes that the price of Ethereum remains stable. Since the value of cryptocurrencies fluctuates, sometimes dramatically, this would be a rough estimate based on current prices. Still, it is interesting. And depressing from a consumer gaming perspective.

Fortunately, the GPU shortage will not last forever; Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said on last month's Q3 earnings call that "given the industry-wide capacity constraints and long cycle times, it may be several more months before products can catch up with demand It may take a few more months for products to catch up with demand," she stated. Therefore, we hope this situation does not extend beyond the first quarter of 2021.