While the crypto mining craze is at an all-time low, shop owners in Vietnam are still building rigs based on NVIDIA's RTX workstation graphics cards.
Vietnamese Shop Repurposes Hundreds of NVIDIA's RTX A4000 Workstation Cards Into Crypto Mining Machines
With the Ethereum proof of stake on the horizon, crypto mining isn't as lucrative as it used to be however, there are other options or alternatives that miners are investing in right now such as Raven, CHR, etc. And since Vietnam has been a very popular crypto mining market, tech retailers are now investing in NVIDIA RTX workstation graphics cards for mining purposes.
One such shop, NC PC, has resorted to selling fully-assembled crypto mining machines with up to 8 NVIDIA RTX A4000 16 GB graphics cards. These graphics cards are purely designed for workstation and content creation purposes but these shop owners know they can sell them to miners for a bigger profit. The shop owners state that one machine is equipped with up to 8 of these cards and offers a 36-month warranty. The hashing power of the machine is rated at around 500 MH/s and it is also stated that it offers higher hashing power than the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti while being cheaper.
The NVIDIA RTX A4000 comes with a blower-styled single-fan design and is meant for longer usage hence it doesn't feature the higher clocks or power ratings as the gaming variants. As such, it will offer lower power consumption and run cooler. Each graphics card produces around 60-63 MH/s while consuming 120-125W power and running at 60C.
The main supplier of these RTX A4000 units seems to be Gigabyte and we can't say if NVIDIA or Gigabyte was aware of their graphics cards being used for such use cases. In the end, we don't expect anyone to take action against such activities if they were bought through legal channels in which case, they can be used for whatever purpose the shop owner or customers deem. There were also cases where certain retailers and shop owners were selling stolen graphics cards at scalped rates.
NVIDIA Ampere Workstation Graphics Cards:
| Graphics Card | NVIDIA RTX A2000 | NVIDIA RTX A4000 | NVIDIA RTX A4500 | NVIDIA RTX A5000 | NVIDIA RTX A5000 | NVIDIA RTX A6000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPU | Ampere GA106 GPU | Ampere GA104 GPU | Ampere GA102 GPU | Ampere GA102 GPU | Ampere GA102 GPU | Ampere GA102 GPU |
| GPU Process | Samsung 8nm | Samsung 8nm | Samsung 8nm | Samsung 8nm | Samsung 8nm | Samsung 8nm |
| Die Size | 276 mm² | 392.5 mm² | 628mm² | 628mm² | 628mm² | 628mm² |
| GPU Cores | 3328 | 6144 | 7168 | 8192 | 10240 | 10752 |
| Tensor Cores | 104 | 192 | 224 | 256 | 320 | 336 |
| Boost Clock | 1200 MHz | 1536 MHz | 1635 MHz | 1697 MHz | TBD | 1455 MHz |
| Single Precision | 8.0 TFLOPs | 19.2 TFLOPs | 23.7 TFLOPs | 27.8 TFLOPs | TBD | 31.2 TFLOPs |
| VRAM | 6/12 GB GDDR6 | 16 GB GDDR6 | 20 GB GDDR6 | 24 GB GDDR6 | 24 GB GDDR6 | 48 GB GDDR6 |
| NVLINK VRAM | N/A | N/A | 40 GB GDDR6 | 48 GB GDDR6 | 48 GB GDDR6 | 96 GB GDDR6 |
| Memory Bus | 192-bit | 256-bit | 320-bit | 384-bit | 384-bit | 384-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 228 GB/s | 448 GB/s | 640 GB/s | 768 GB/s | 768 GB/s | 768 GB/s |
| TDP | 70W | 140W | 200W | 230W | 280W | 300W |
| Launch Price | TBC | TBC | TBC | TBC | TBD | $4650 US |
| Launch Date | October. 2021 | April, 2021 | Q4 2021 | April, 2021 | Q1 2022 | December, 2020 |
News Source: I_Leak_VN
