Cryptocurrency Mining Rigs in Vietnam Are Featuring Rare RTX 3080s At Insane Pricing

RJ Pierce, Tech Times 13 July 2021, 06:07 pm

Cryptocurrency mining rigs being sold as prebuilts in Vietnam take advantage of rare RTX 3080s that are non-LHR. And they cost an arm and a leg.

WCCFTech reports that the extremely rare ASUS RTX 3080 Gundam edition is the card in question, and they are being installed in prebuilt cryptocurrency mining rigs in Vietnam priced at around $18,000. That's the total cost of the rig (excluding the other parts like memory, motherboard, CPU, cooling, and power supply) if going by current street pricing for the Gundam edition 3080.

(Photo : ASUS)

It's actually the GPUs making this bit of information newsworthy due to how rare they are. If you try to buy one these days, you can only find the card on eBay at extremely marked-up prices. That's because this model of the RTX 3080 is meant to be a collector's item. It's supposed to be a part of a special series by ASUS which commemorates the classic giant mecha anime.

Since these cards are almost impossible to buy, the main issue here is that these Vietnamese retailers wouldn't have received stocks of the card without directly involving ASUS or some other big-name retailer.

So, if you're a massive fan of the Gundam series and want to go for a themed build, you're out of luck. Unless you have tons of disposable income, that is.

Cryptocurrency Mining via GPUs: Still Profitable?

While the aforementioned news could sound a bit heartbreaking for gamers, it's not as bad as it seems. That's because the Gundam RTX 3080 is a non-LHR (Lite Hash Rate) card.

NVIDIA released these LHR cards earlier this year to prevent folks from buying graphics cards for mining. And it turned out that these cards actually work. Team Green lived up to their promise that LHR GPUs would slash their RTX 3000 series' hash rate performance in half, and that's what numerous tests proved.

(Photo : Peter Dazeley/Getty Images)
LONDON,UNITED KINGDOM - JUNE 3: An employee is seen building a cryptocurrency units to mine and to trade bitcoin at Trio Mining on June 3,2021 in London, England.

Going back to the Gundam edition RTX 3080, they're only ever going to be appealing to crypto miners. LHR cards might be weaker at mining, but they perform pretty much like their non-LHR cards at gaming. Also, non-LHR GPUs will retain some sort of resale value once miners are done with them. When the crypto bubble bursts, they can at least regain a fair amount of their investment by reselling these cards on the market.

What About CMPs?

Aside from LHR, NVIDIA also launched their cryptocurrency mining processors (CMP) graphics cards which are specifically designed for mining. But despite selling quite well, they still didn't catch the eye of miners who want to use the resale value of gaming-focused GPUs as a fallback. This is among the main reasons why the RTX 3080 Gundam edition is so in-demand because miners will be fighting to get a hold of them whenever they can.

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Written by RJ Pierce