Alongside the iPhone 12 Pro and PlayStation 5, one tech item that’s selling out worldwide is NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3000 series GPUs. Thanks to major performance boosts over previous generations and a surge in home gaming during the pandemic, high-end GPUs like the RTX 3090 and RTX 3080 have become seriously hard to find.
Getting your hands on a new NVIDIA GPU is tough for most people, but Simon Byrne from Las Vegas, USA recently shocked everyone by revealing he owns a whopping 78 RTX 3080 cards.
Clearly, Simon isn’t using 78 RTX 3080s for gaming. Instead, he’s mining cryptocurrency, specifically Ethereum (ETH). People have even done rough calculations on his costs and profits from investing in such an expensive GPU setup.
First, let’s talk costs:
– Each RTX 3080 has a retail price of $699. But as mentioned, these GPUs are scarce, forcing buyers to pay scalpers around $1,199 each. So Simon’s upfront cost is $1,199 x 78 = $93,522. Let’s round that to $100,000 since he also needs power supplies, racks, and other gear.
– Running so many GPUs 24/7 consumes a ton of electricity. One RTX 3080 uses about 300 watts, so 78 cards pull roughly 23.4 kilowatts. In Las Vegas, electricity costs 8.43 cents per kWh. Adding cooling expenses (crucial for keeping the rig stable), Simon’s monthly power bill is around $2,166.
Now, let’s look at revenue and profit:
– Using the Ethash algorithm, each RTX 3080 mines about 83.57 MH/s, generating 0.22236870 ETH per month, worth roughly $165. So 78 cards produce 17.3 ETH monthly, or $12,840.
– Over a year, that’s $154,080 in revenue. After subtracting electricity costs, Simon nets $128,088 annually. Even after factoring in hardware expenses, he still makes over $28,000 a year in profit.
Of course, these profits depend on ETH prices staying around $700 to $800.
