Early in 2021, Nvidia released LHR (light hash rate) versions of its graphics cards, starting with the RTX 3060, in the interest of keeping cryptocurrency miners from buying up all the stock before gamers could get their hands on them. However, it looks like that plan just went up in smoke.
New software posted on GitHub by user SergeyDev allegedly gets around the hash rate limiter, making the graphics cards much more powerful for mining purposes. The speeds of each unlocked GPU have been reported by Chinese tech website MyDrivers, and spotted by the folks over at VideoCardz and it appears that all of the Nvidia graphics cards are back at full mining strength.
The software is essentially a third-party graphics driver and BIOS, so this would definitely fall in the “download at your own risk” category, but if it works, it could make all these Nvidia cards freshly attractive to Bitcoin miners, reduce supplies and send graphics card prices on the rise, again.
We don't test cryptocurrency mining performance here at TechRadar, so we can't speak to the efficacy of this software. But either way, it's unlikely that Nvidia will be able to easily stamp out this workaround, as any existing graphics cards on the market would need a BIOS update to counter it.
We've reached out to Nvidia for comment, and we'll update this story if and when we hear anything back from Team Green. But this isn't the first time this has happened and it looks like graphics cards may start to become more expensive soon – as hard as that is to hear.
English
Arabic
Belarusian
Bengali
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Chinese (Simplified)
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
Estonian
Filipino
Finnish
French
Georgian
German
Greek
Gujarati
Hausa
Hebrew
Hindi
Hmong
Hungarian
Igbo
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Kazakh
Korean
Kurdish (Kurmanji)
Kyrgyz
Lao
Latvian
Lithuanian
Macedonian
Malagasy
Norwegian
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Punjabi
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Swedish
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese
Yoruba