Did NVIDIA really sell thousands of its Ampere graphics cards to miners? Those allegations are still up in the air, but those of you who wish to fuel that theory can check out crypto enthusiast Simon Byrne’s latest mining rig, which happens to comprise a massive rack of 78 GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards. It isn’t clear how Byrne managed to get his hands on so many of NVIDIA’s flagship GPUs, but he did confirm that “Bertha 2” is nearly operational for some serious Ether-mining action.
A cost breakdown shared by Tech ARP suggests that the rig is able to generate a net profit of around $10,674 per month or $128,088 per year. We’re not entirely convinced that the math works out due to variables in exchange rates and the lack of pricing information for each GeForce RTX 3080 GPU, but we’ve copied its findings below.
Officially, RTX 3080 cards start at $699, but due to the shortage of cards, they are now selling for about $1,199 each.
So the cards in this rig alone would cost approximately $93,522. Let’s call it a flat $100,000 for the whole rig, plus power supplies.
The average commercial electricity rate in Las Vegas (where he’s based) is 8.43 cents per kWh. So electricity should cost about $1444 per month. Let’s make that $2166 per month (+50%) to account for cooling costs.
Each GeForce RTX 3080 has a hash rate of 83.57 MH/s using the Ethash (Phoenix) algorithm, which should generate approximately 0.22236870 ETH worth US$165 every month.
So the total rig of 78 cards should generate 17.3447586 ETH worth $12,840 per month. Deducting electricity costs, that’s a net profit of $10,674 per month or $128,088 per year!
That’s an incredible ROI of 10.7% per month, which means he recovers the cost of the entire rig in just under 9.5 months.
Byrne did note on his Facebook page that he was making a net profit of around $900 per day ($27,900 a month), but it isn’t clear what mining rig his estimate is in reference to. Tech ARP also reported that none of the GeForce RTX 3080 GPUs he purchased was from the regular retail supply chain.
