Laptop RTX 3070 GPU spotted inside a desktop graphics card. Of course it's for mining crypto
Here's a curious case of a GPU switcheroo. There are RTX 3070 graphics cards up for sale in Asia with mobile RTX 3070 chips in them—the kind intended for gaming laptops, not discrete graphics cards. Well, it could be someone who had an abundance of laptop GPUs to hand and no laptops to put them in, but of course, it actually appears a play to bypass any cryptocurrency mining restrictions and make more money.
A Facebook post(opens in new tab) from Vietnam, spotted by leaker I_Leak_VN(opens in new tab), outlines someone's hands-on impressions of the so-called RTX 3070M. They mention that «this GPU was previously only used for laptops, now they have packed it into cheap VGA.» There's no clear branding visible on the shroud. However, it's likely manufactured by a GPU OEM partner in China as it's also been spotted on the Chinese marketplace Taobao and Aliexpress.
The RTX 3070M is going for the equivalent of $738 on Aliexpress(opens in new tab). That's not particularly cheap—you could pick up an RTX 3070 for less on Newegg(opens in new tab) today—but there's another draw for this card's most likely customers: cryptocurrency mining efficiency.
A regular RTX 3070 will operate at around 45MH/s when mining ethereum, and that's a reduced rate due to Nvidia's cryptocurrency mining limiter, Lite Hash Rate (LHR), which prevents many of its discrete graphics cards from running at 100% efficiency when a specific mining workload is recognised.
This mobile RTX 3070M is reportedly able to deliver around 65MH/s, using a GPU that was never thought to be much use to miners and therefore never came with any form of crypto-mining limiter installed.
Powerful mining performance: pic.twitter.com/6njGFZ1x6NMay 26, 2022
From what I can tell, 65MH/s
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