Clampdown on Crypto Mining Cuts China's GPU Prices Nearly 45 Percent
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Clampdown On Crypto Mining Cuts China's GPU Prices Nearly 45 Percent:
China's non-stop effort to crack down on cryptocurrency mining farms has started to pay dividends. As the South China Morning Post reported today, graphics card pricing in the country has decreased substantially over the past few weeks. Following up on the South China Morning Post's tip, we've analyzed the historic pricing for various Ampere graphics cards. You can see the pricing trends in our breakdown below, but the clear takeaway is that pricing has receded as much as 45% since Beijing began pulling the plug on big mining farms around the country.
Besides being some of the best graphics cards for gaming, Nvidia's GeForce RTX 30-series (Ampere) cards are also very popular for cryptocurrency mining. It's impossible for us to look at pricing for every single Ampere model, so we randomly picked custom models from each tier to get a general idea of pricing behavior.
The price war is intense, so there's considerable pricing variation for the same graphics card model at different retailers. However, graphics card makers typically have their own online stores at major online retailers, such as Tmall, which is one of the biggest in China. We pulled the pricing from the official stores via Manmanbuy, a popular price tracker in China.
We observed a reduction in pricing up to 45% on some of Nvidia's latest graphics cards, such as the GeForce RTX 3060 - this mid-range Ampere card was one of the more popular models among mining farms in China. The higher-up models exhibited a smaller price reduction, though.
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