RTX 3060 Not for Cryptominers; Nvidia to Release Dedicated Mining GPUs
The GeForce RTX 3060 will hit stores soon. Some have already received the card for testing, including those interested in cryptomining. For the latter, however, the new GPU contains some not-so-pleasant surprises.
Some can already boast of owning a GeForce RTX 3060, although its release is scheduled for February 25. Among them there are also cryptominers. These, however, may encounter a rather unpleasant surprise. One of cryptocurrency youtubers, after performing tests, informs about a limitation that Nvidia has applied to this model - it can figure out that it is being used as a cryptomining device, at which point it cut its the performance by half.
Nvidia confirms such a "feature" in RTX 3060 cards. Their driver will detect algorithms specific to mining Ethereum (the announcement mentions this particular cryptocurrency) and will reduce performance so that the hashrate drops to almost half of base value. In CryptoLeo's (the aforementioned miner/youtuber) cryptocurrency tests, the speed of the new GPUs stabilized at 26 MH/s after a while, although over 40 MH/s is expected from this card.
Hashrate
The number of hashes, or hash functions per second - the primary measure of device performance used by cryptominers. It reaches different values depending on the type of cryptocurrency (and, of course, hardware).
It is worth noting that the limitater is also located in the card's circuits and BIOS (source), and not only in the system drivers (that is, its operation is independent of the OS). According to Nvidia, this solution is to ensure the availability of these cards for gamers, since RTX 3060 is unlikely to be profitable for miners. There are some suggestions (or rather, speculations) that the remaining models from the Nvidia range could also be replaced in the future (the so-called relaunch) by versions with "anti-miner" protection.
However, the manufacturer does not intend to go to war with cryptominers. On the contrary - it offers dedicated chipsets for cryptomining, called CMPs (Crypto Mining Processors). The HX line are devices without video outputs, optimized for power consumption.
Four models were announced, with performance on Ethereum expected to range from 26 MH/s to 86 MH/s and power consumption from 125 W to 320 W. The 30HX and 40HX models with 6GB and 8GB of memory are expected to arrive in the first quarter of this year, while the 50HX and 90HX with 10GB of VRAM are expected in the second quarter. The cards will be available from Nvidia's partners.
