Bitcoin price surges and so does GPU mining
Last week we shared a photo of a GPU mining rig that was using 78 GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards. As it turns out, this is not the first time the owner of this rig, Simon Byrne, has come up with such a system.
The RTX 3080-based mining rig that was shared on social media is codenamed Berta 2 and it is already operational. The price of 1 Bitcoin (BTC) has recently skyrocketed to 34K USD but has remained in this position for a short time. As the price of Bitcoin price surges, pricing of other cryptocurrencies naturally followed, some of which can still be mined on GPUs.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Mining Rig, Source: TechARP
GeForce RTX 30 series have a good performance to watt ratio when mining is considered, especially when mining Ethereum, which is currently worth 1K USD. TechARP who posted a new photo of the mining system already in operation were quick to calculate how much digital currency could such a system actually generate. Assuming that the price of RTX 3080 is somewhere in the 699 to 1199 USD space, the cost of the whole rig is estimated at 100K USD.
According to Minerstat, each RTX 3080 graphics card can generate between 6.35 USD and 9.15 USD a day (that’s including electricity cost and assuming today’s Ethereum pricing). This means that the whole system can generate between 15K to 21K USD a month. What this means is that the cost of all 78 RTX 3080 cards will be covered in 6.6 months in the worst-case scenario but assuming that ETH price won’t change and that seems hard to predict.
The pricing of cryptocurrency has changed so rapidly in the past few weeks that the article at TechArp calculates a return of investment at 9.7 months. This is now much more GPU mining profitability has increased.
2021 GPU Mining Profitability, Source: Minerstat
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Mining Rig, Source: Simon Byrne
Source: Simon Byrne, TechArp