I've had eBay saved searches for "RTX 3070" and "RTX 3060 Ti" running since February. Every time my phone buzzes with a notification I get this stupid little jolt of hope, and then I look and it's another Founders Edition going for $950 that Nvidia sells at $499 whenever it actually has stock. Someone listed one this morning at $1,050 with the caption "great for mining or gaming!!" like that's a selling point and not the entire reason I can't buy one.
So last week actually mattered to me, for once. On Tuesday the 18th, Nvidia put out a blog post about new "Lite Hash Rate" versions of the RTX 3080, 3070 and 3060 Ti, cards that have their Ethereum mining performance cut roughly in half at the driver level. Alongside that they announced a whole separate line, the CMP HX series, built specifically for miners, no display outputs at all. The idea, as far as I can tell, is to split the market in two: give miners a purpose-built product so they stop hoovering up every gaming card the second it hits a shelf.
Then the very next day the crypto market did its own thing without any help from Nvidia. China's banking and payments associations told member institutions they can't offer crypto-related services anymore, and Bitcoin fell off a cliff, from around $43k down under $30k in a matter of hours on Wednesday before clawing some of it back. Ethereum dropped even harder in percentage terms. Twitter was, predictably, unbearable that whole day.
Now every PC subreddit and half my group chat is convinced this is the moment. Miners panic sell, secondhand cards flood back onto eBay and Facebook Marketplace, prices finally come back to something resembling MSRP. I want to believe it. I really do. I've been trying to build a new machine since my GTX 1060 started struggling with anything released after 2019, and I'm tired of gaming on a laptop that sounds like it's trying to achieve liftoff every time I open a Chrome tab.
But I've watched this exact cycle before, back in 2017 and 2018 during the last mining boom, and prices did not snap back the way everyone hoped. They drifted down over months, not days, and only after a bunch of other dominoes fell too. A 30-40% crash in coin prices over one bad week doesn't automatically mean miners are unprofitable, it just means their margins got worse. A lot of the bigger operations are still running the numbers and deciding whether to keep the rigs on at all. And the underlying chip shortage, the actual wafer and substrate supply problem that's been squeezing basically every industry that touches semiconductors this year, has nothing to do with crypto whatsoever. Even if every miner on earth sold their cards tomorrow, Nvidia and AMD still couldn't make new ones fast enough to catch up with regular demand.
The LHR thing is a smart move on paper, and I don't think it's pure PR, but I'm skeptical it changes buying behavior much in the short term. Miners who already own a card aren't going to throw it out because new stock has a hash limiter now, they'll just keep running what they've got and snap up whatever old unlimited stock is still floating around. It'll be months before LHR cards are common enough to actually shift the secondhand market, if the limiter even holds up (people were already digging through the drivers looking for a workaround within days of the announcement, which, sure, checks out).
Anyway. I'm keeping the eBay alerts running, and I'm not holding my breath for a $499 3070 to show up in June, but I wouldn't mind being wrong about that one. If anyone reading this actually manages to snag a card at MSRP through Best Buy's queue system or wherever, tell me your secret. Until then the 1060 soldiers on, fan noise and all.