With Ethereum almost $1,600, mining is has been very profitable and miners are scrambling to get their hands on next gen GPUs. With RTX 3000 series GPUs almost impossible to find, miners are turning to laptops with RTX 3070 and 3080 GPUs in them to supplement their GPU farms.
A bulk of these GPU mining operations are in China with power prices as low as $0.03 kwh. At those prices a single RTX 3070 laptop can make a profit of just under $6/day with a 3080 pulling as much as $9.40 after electricity costs.
With a RTX 3080 laptop costing around $2,000, a miner can break even in around 7 months if nothing else changes. Nvidia RTX 30 laptops are becoming just as difficult to get a hold of as a result.
I've actually been considering getting back into Ethereum mining and regret selling my mining rigs despite making almost 100% of my purchase price back. Although most of my cards were 3GB and wouldn't be able to mine Ethereum as the current dag size is 4.07GB.
Even an older Nvidia 1070 can make around $2.20/day with moderately high electricity costs of $0.15 kwh. Looking at Ebay, I am seeing 1070's going for around $360-$400+, I paid $400 back in 2017.
The demand for GPUS for gaming and current stock shortages has had a massive impact on the gaming industry. Gaming on PC has become a luxury reserved for the lucky or those willing to pay a premium of as much as 250% over MSRP. Even building an used machine has become difficult with 5 year old GPU cards going for near original cost.
