The trunk of the BMW needs to be kept open at all times to ensure that the mining rig doesn't overheat.
A man has fitted six high-end graphics cards into the trunk of his BMW i8 so he can mine Ethereum while he drives.
Simon Byrne told PC Gamer that the advanced setup — which features Nvidia RTX 3080s — has been designed “just to annoy gamers.”
Unfortunately, it appears that the sweet ride isn’t necessarily the most practical thing in existence. The rig is at risk of overheating unless the trunk is kept open at all times.
Gamers are likely to be annoyed at Byrne’s stunt because of how it’s getting harder and harder to buy graphics cards these days — with bots starting to squeeze supplies of the top models. Those running the bots tend to have two motives: reselling the graphics cards at a higher price or using them to mine cryptocurrency.
The BMW hybrid costs close to $150,000 — and photos of the setup published by Hardware Times shows that Byrne’s number plate is… get this… HODLER.
Last year, Byrne built a mining farm featuring 78 graphics cards at a cost of about $100,000 — stumping up $2,166 a month on top of this for electricity and air conditioning. Overall, it’s estimated that this setup generates about 17.3 ETH a month — and thanks to the dramatic price rises seen over the course of January, that means he would be sitting on a monthly profit of about $19,930.
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