The mining limitation established by Nvidia for current graphics cards can now be circumvented almost completely.
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The hash brake established by Nvidia has been almost completely eliminated.
© nvidia.com
With LHR (Lite Hash Rate), Nvidia wants to tackle the scarcity of graphics cards. The newly launched GPUs were limited by the manufacturer in their hash performance, so they should become unattractive for the operators of large crypto farms. It was only this month that NiceHash was able to remove this software limitation for most graphics cards.
LHR v1 and v2 cracked
For miners, the current Ampere graphics cards are popular mainly because of their fast GDDR6X memory and high efficiency with the Dagger Hashimoto algorithm. This allows the cryptocurrency Ethereum to be mined with profits. Since the RTX 3060, however, Nvidia has only offered its graphics cards with a hash rate limit. This is to keep graphics card prices down. However, the first lock (v1) was quickly overridden with its own driver. The limitation of LHR v2 was now installed on all Nvidia graphics cards except the Geforce RTX 3090. As of this month, however, this ban has also been circumvented.
LHR v3 also almost eliminated
This left only the cards with LHR v3, for example the RTX 3080 12 GB and the RTX 3050. But miners have now been able to largely overcome this limitation of Nvidia: the cards now offer at least 90 percent of the mining performance previously offered by the manufacturer was limited to 50 percent. However, since the Ethereum prices have now fallen below 2,000 euros per ether, a new price increase for graphics cards should not be imminent. So bypassing the hash brake shouldn’t have that much of an impact on graphics card prices.
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