It would be unfair to say that the current Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 series inventory shortage is entirely the fault of digital currency miners, instead of facilitating faster production of cards like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 and the latest Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, the added demand seems to be primarily pulling older GPUs out of retirement

The latest to be pulled from the dusty shelves is the 2016 Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 More precisely, it's a GP106 GPU: PC Gamer has discovered new ECC filings for several GP106 models that will likely be reinvented as mining workhorses following the RTX 2060 and GTX 1050 Ti

How does this help the average PC owner who just wants one RTX 30 series card in stock? Probably not at all

Palit's obvious "new" cards use the P106 branding and are reminiscent of the Palit P106 cards released during the last big mining boom of 2017 These were built specifically for use in mining rigs and lacked the display output needed to function as a gaming-centric graphics card This may divert some miners' interest away from the RTX 30 series, but not enough to warrant a large inventory

To be fair, Palit's strategy is not a million miles away from Nvidia's own attempts to ease RTX 30 series cards away from miners and toward the general consumer Nvidia has its own dedicated mining card, the CMP ( Cryptocurrency Mining Processor) series, which also has no display output

This, along with the intentionally greatly reduced mining effectiveness of the RTX 3060, raised hopes that the latest and cheapest of the RTX 30 series might escape the fate of being purchased in large numbers and crammed into mining rigs However, as anyone who has checked out where to buy the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 knows, it is still largely sold out, regardless of who purchased it

Furthermore, Palit's GP106-based cards will have to compete with Nvidia's CMP series, which will likely have an even smaller impact on the RTX 30 series

Unfortunately, RTX 30 series inventory will almost certainly remain low until Nvidia finds a way to increase production, which it is struggling to do due to material shortages and low yields on key components

If it is not entirely Minor's fault, it is definitely not Palit's fault But this new trend of bringing back mothballed GPUs to meet Minor's needs shows just how out of touch this shortage has become, while PC owners are forced to wait for cards that were released months ago