As the great graphics card shortage rages on, cryptocurrency miners are turning their attention from dedicated GPUs to full-blown gaming laptops, causing the notebook supply to struggle. While it’s common knowledge that these won’t beat the best graphics card at the job, MSI’s part-way through an experiment to see just how profitable gaming laptops are mining 24 hours a day, seven days a week for a month.
The MSI GE76 Raider gaming laptop at the centre of the analysis is in a category of its own with an Intel i9 10980HK CPU, a 155W mobile Nvidia RTX 3080 GPU, and an “exclusive cooling design.” This is much more than most laptops out there, but it’s still a single graphics card on its lonesome in a closed chassis, so it’s unlikely to pull in the same cryptocurrency numbers as the comprehensive farms that house multiple GPUs in an air conditioned room.
MSI’s experiment is conducted on the Nicehash platform, using the DaggerHashimoto algorithm, where the hash rate of the mobile RTX 3080 is around 52.8MH/s. This is below the whopping 95.7MH/s the desktop version pulls in and is much more in line with the RTX 3070’s 52.9.MH/s.
It’s quite a different, almost celebratory approach towards the cryptocurrency mining community, compared to Nvidia outright nerfing the RTX 3060 and stating GeForce GPUs are meant for gamers.
MSI started the experiment on February 25, so we’re about half way through at this point. Will it be profitable? More than likely, but we can’t imagine this particular MSI GE76 Raider will be the best gaming laptop after this level of continuous punishment. Check back in around two weeks for the results.