by Here’s a weird GPU switch. There are RTX 3070 graphics cards for sale in Asia with RTX 3070 chip chips in them — the kind intended for gaming laptops rather than discrete graphics cards. Well, it could be someone who had plenty of GPUs for laptops and did not have laptops to install them, but of course, it really seems like a game to bypass any cryptocurrency mining restrictions and make more money.
A post on Facebook (opens in new tab) from Vietnam, was spotted by a burglar I_Leak_VN (opens in new tab), describes one’s practical impressions of the so-called RTX 3070M. They state that “this GPU was used only for laptops in the past, now it has been packaged in cheap VGA.” There is no clear name visible on the shroud. However, it is likely to be manufactured by an OEM GPU partner in China, as it has also been spotted in the Chinese market Taobao and Aliexpress.
The RTX 3070M costs $ 738 on Aliexpress (opens in new tab). This is not very cheap – you could buy an RTX 3070 cheaper in Newegg (opens in new tab) today — but there is another draw for the card’s most potential customers: cryptocurrency mining efficiency.
A regular RTX 3070 will run at around 45 MH / s when ethereum mining, which is a reduced percentage due to Nvidia’s Lite Hash Rate (LHR) cryptocurrency limiter, which prevents many of its distinctive graphics cards from running at 100 % yield when a specific mining workload is recognized.
This mobile RTX 3070M is reportedly capable of delivering around 65MH / s, using a GPU that was never considered to be very useful for miners and therefore never had a crypto-mining limiter installed.
Strong mining performance: pic.twitter.com/6njGFZ1x6NMay 26, 2022
From what I can say, 65MH / s is the ethereum fragmentation rate of the RTX 3070M and not a hybrid multi-fragmentation rate at the same time. Either way, it is said to be higher than an off-pack LHR RTX 3070 desktop card can offer.
Although it must be said that Nvidia’s LHR lock has been broken repeatedly (opens in new tab) or decreased significantly over the past year, and many miners had already considered that Nvidia’s actions were largely unnecessary (opens in new tab) to meet the mining demand for GPU gaming.
There is also a catch to the RTX 3070M: as stated on the Aliexpress product page, the RTX 3070M will not work with Windows 10, which is almost certainly due to desktop driver issues. Instead, it requires Linux. All of this is nice and weird for crypto-miners who are already using Linux for their mining devices, but it closes the door on a regular Windows gaming computer with one of these cards installed.
Therefore, if you still believe that they were intended for gaming purposes in any way, you would be making a big mistake.
Ethereum’s profitability has plummeted in recent months, however, along with a larger cryptocurrency collapse that saw most of this year’s profits disappear. This has seen GPU demand decline for the first time in at least 18 months. Although graphics cards are still very expensive, they are now at least widely available for purchase — the desktop GPU RTX 3070M may arrive at the party a little late.
