Crypto mining rigs making a return is good news for PC gamers… wait, what?!

Just in time for the Ethereum market crash, the Chinese mining company Bitmain has presented its Ethereum miner Antminer E9.

According to that Company Twitter announcement (opens in new tab), the mining rig is said to completely outperform any GPU setup and claims that its new mining machine can reach the power of 25 GeForce RTX 3080. These claims, impressive as they are, seem true as an Antminter can hit 2,400MHz compared to the 100MHz of an RTX 3080.

This is not the first time Bitmain’s Antminer E9 Ethereum miner has been mentioned as the company first revealed its existence back in 2021. The rigs are priced at $9,999 (roughly of RTX 3080s selling at the Founders Edition MSRP of $699 (roughly £580 / AU$1,000), which would equate to around $17,500.

This makes the Antminer ETC/ETH Miner E9 a whopping 43% cheaper than buying the equivalent number of RTX 3080 cards, and its power consumption is also dramatically lower.

The Miner E9 is said to have a power consumption of just 1,920W for 2,400 MH/s, compared to 25 RTX 3080 cards at 224W each to achieve 97.88 MH/s per card, for an overall hash rate of 2,447 corresponds to MH/s. However, the RTX cards consume 5,600W of power for that marginally higher rate. This makes something like the E9 miner a far more attractive investment for cryptominers who care more about profit maximization and efficiency than sheer peak performance.

The fact that there is a mining rig that can so effectively replace dozens of the best graphics cards hopefully means there will be plenty more for PC gamers to buy, and that’s not even factoring in the drop in demand for graphics cards in the world crypto crash.

Analysis: The impact of the crypto crash on mining rigs

So why would Bitmain bring up its Antminer mining rig again after over a year of silence? Most likely, the big lag came from Bitmain, which used it to mine Ethereum itself before the massive crash wiped out 75% of the cryptocurrency’s value.

And now they are most likely trying to recoup those losses, as many crypto miners are desperately trying to do Unload your used GPUs. With mining yields significantly lower now than they were in 2021, price will determine how well Bitmain’s rig will sell in the first place.

And considering that the Linzhi “Phoenix” ASIC miner cost $11,300 and $13,700 at a time when the currency was still profitable, it means that the Antminer will most likely have to be sold a lot cheaper to be even remotely profitable to be.

While this bodes well for the GPU market, the existence of more dedicated Ethereum mining rigs capable of outperforming any graphics card, coupled with crypto’s current demise means that we will hopefully see more of the same back into the hands of the players. Whether this will help reduce some the ecological impact However, the outcome of this whole situation, as shown by the sharp drop in CO2 emissions since the crash began, remains to be seen.

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