With NVIDIA introducing LHR cards, non-LHR variants have been going up in value (the price hike has been largely correlated with mining performance and ROI of the GPUs) and one Vietnamese retailer is actually selling incredibly rare ASUS GUNDAM RTX 3080 GPUs in a pre-built mining configuration for an obscene MSRP (Nguyenconpc via I_Leak_VN via Videocardz).
Rare anime-inspired, limited edition ASUS RTX 3080 non-LHR cards are ending up in mining rigs
This story is particularly impactful because the cards in question are none other than ASUS’ anime-inspired limited-edition series called GUNDAM. You can probably find one of these for around 2312 USD on ebay and while they were originally meant to be a collector’s item they are actually ending up in prebuilt mining rigs. Considering the fact that these cards are almost impossible to find and ASUS only sent a few shipments to North America, it is hard to believe that these retailers would have received these cards without AIC involvement.
The single consolation is that with Ethereum’s shift to Proof of Stake mining upcoming this year, it is the beginning of the end for GPU mining. While miners will almost certainly shift to other coins, in a few years, most legitimate cryptocurrencies will have moved to staking - eliminating the need for power-hungry GPU mining. This combined with NVIDIA’s push with LHR cards means that gamers should actually have access to affordable GPUs before the year is over.
China is a huge global market and the crackdown there, coupled with NVIDIAs introduction of LHR cards and the global cryptocurrency slump seems to have created the perfect conditions for a GPU price crash. As per data published by 3DCenter, prices in germany are down by almost 50% over the peak in May. On May 21, some cards were selling for as much as 304% the MSRP but have since crashed to a relatively more palatable level of 150%. In other words, prices of GPUs have basically halved there.
