Due to the growing popularity and spread of various cryptocurrencies, especially bitcoin, more and more often people are trying to profit from it. Someone trades cryptocurrency with the help of special crypto bots like Zignaly. Others are engaged in mining. In the latter case, you need powerful equipment. I know many of you have been looking for a single RTX 3080 graphics card, well this guy has 78! One of the main reasons for the shortage of available NVIDIA RTX 30 series cards is of course crypto-mining. Simon Byrne of Las Vegas has built this insane crypto-mining rig with 78 GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards in an array of 13 x 6 cards.
So how much would a rig like this cost to build? Well we are not sure if Simon paid retail or scalping prices for these cards. The cards appear to be PNY GeForce RTX 3080 10GB XLR8 Gaming REVEL EPIC-X cards, which had an MSRP of $749.99. So if he paid retail the price for the cards would be around $60,000. Now if he paid say $1199 (scalping price) the cost of the cards would be $93,552!
These cards consume around 300 watts per card, so they would require at least 23.4 kilowatts of power to run. The commercial electricity rate in Las Vegas is 8.43 cents per kWh. So you running the entire rig would cost $1444 per month and lets double that to $2166 to account for cooling costs.
An RTX 3080 has a hash rate of 83.57 MH/s using the Ethash (Phoenix) algorithm, which should generate approximately 0.22236870 ETH worth $165 every month. The total rig would generate around 17.3447586 ETH each month coming in at $12,840 per month. If we deduct electricity / cooling costs that is a net profit of $10,674 per month or $128,088 per year!
He would be able to pay off the total cost of the cards in well under a year!
Via TechARP
