As hard as it is to find a place to buy an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, some limited edition models are even scarcer than their mass-produced counterparts But even these limited edition graphics cards are marketed more toward crypto miners than regular PC owners

As discovered by VideoCardz, a computing store in Vietnam was photographed stuffing multiple Asus RTX 3080 ROG Strix Gundam cards (some of the rarest GPUs) into a mining-rig compatible rack

Asus' Gundam series was a crossover with a leading Japanese sci-fi franchise, and production in Asia was limited As such, the graphics cards in this series are extremely popular and very expensive, even by the bloated standards of typical GeForce RTX 30 series pricing

One would think that the combination of huge expense and even greater scarcity than usual would make Asus Gundam cards a less attractive target for miners But apparently no GPU is so well-known that it cannot be used for cryptocurrency mining Especially if these particular models were released before Nvidia added a hash rate limiter to the cards and began to intentionally degrade mining performance for certain currencies

A costly workaround, but clearly not an entirely unattractive one, Twitter user I_Leak_VN posted an original photo of up to eight RTX 3080 ROG Strix Gundam units shoved into a rack These appear to be designed for easy integration into existing large-scale mining operations Given that the cards themselves are too close together for the onboard cooler to be effective, you can see fan mounts for additional ventilation

In China, miners are selling off graphics cards at or below list price because the government crackdown on crypto mining is so strong However, in Vietnam and elsewhere, the lure of ethereum and other crypto riches will continue to be strong, making it even more difficult to purchase the latest graphics cards for personal use