China Crypto Crackdown Leads To Cheap Second Hand RTX 30 Series Graphics Cards
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Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPUs and other Nvidia RTX 30 graphics cards are being found for increasingly cheap prices on the Chinese Internet marketplace. Read below to find out more!
Clampdowns on crypto miners by the Chinese government continue to ramp up, though it remains unevenly enforced across the country, with certain regions banning mining outright and conducting raids on mining operations, others merely pressuring businesses and institutions not to deal in crypto and generally condemning it. One of the regions of the country with less stringent enforcement is Sichuan, and as a result many miners have relocated there.
Seeing that the end is nigh for mining, many of these Sichuan-based miners have begun to sell off as much of their equipment as possible whilst prices remain high (although Nvidia GPU prices continue to fall). This includes laptops (ones containing RTX 3060 Max-Q versions were spotted for circa $1,000), full desktop PCs, and graphics cards, in particular Nvidia RTX 30 Series GPUs. The lowest reported price that has been seen for an RTX 30 Series GPU is a second-hand RTX 3060, which was spotted going for the equivalent of $270 (listed as ¥1,760) on The Block – a cryptocurrency website.
Of course, buying a second-hand GPU used by cryptominers does come with its risks.
We would definitely advise erring on the side of caution when buying any second-hand graphics card, but given the glut of cheap ones coming out of China have almost definitely been used for crypto mining means, extra discretion is needed.
Ultimately, any graphics card that is used for crypto mining purposes will have undergone a lot more stress than a GPU used simply for gaming – having been made to run around the clock, utilizing the highest amount of its processing power almost constantly. This means that any second-hand GPU previously used by crypto miners must be assumed to have had its longevity impacted significantly, and possibly also its performance reduced somewhat.
If you buy one of these cards, try and make sure it is from a reputable seller, that you are covered by some sort of returns policy from whichever site you buy it from, and that the pictures you see of the product (assuming you can) are 1. genuine and 2. do not display any obvious signs of damage or wear and tear. At the end of the day though – it is likely you won’t ever know how degraded a GPU is until you have used it for a good length of time – buying such cards is always a risky move.
We can’t promise you will find one as cheap as a second hand, former mining GPU, but check out our Where To Buy The RTX 3060 page as well as our other Where To Buy RTX 30 Series pages below to have the best chance of getting hold of a brand new Nvidia graphics card:
Where To Buy An RTX 3050 & RTX 3050 Ti
Where To Buy Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060
Where To Buy Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti
Where To Buy Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070
Where To Buy Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti
Where To Buy Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080
Where To Buy Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti
Where To Buy Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090
