Second attempt: new comer GeForce RTX 3060 with mining brake

Starting in May 2021, a new version of the GeForce RTX 3060 could hit the market. Specifications should be identical, but under the hood there will be a newer version of the graphics chip: the GA106-302 instead of the previous GA106-300 GPU.

With this new version, you want Nvidia According to the Chinese language website HKEPC Ethereum artificially slowed mining of the cryptocurrency again. The driver and graphics card BIOS is supposed to recognize the Ethash algorithm through several memory accesses, and as a result, it cuts mining performance in half in order to make the GeForce RTX 3060 undesirable to miners.

Second try

Nvidia had already introduced these brakes with the original GeForce RTX 3060 in February 2021, but they crossed the same limit with a test driver. Large mining farms are not dependent on current versions, for example with game improvements, and can continue to use beta driver for years without brakes.

With a new GPU variant, Nvidia at least gets over the problem with newly delivered graphics cards: Thanks to the new hardware ID, the old driver doesn’t recognize the new version, so a newer driver version with brakes must be installed. So miners have to consider their alternative solution so that they can use GeForce RTX 3060 with the full computing power of Ethereum mining.

More limited GPUs

Rumors have it that more GeForce graphics cards could receive Ethereum brakes in the future. Twitter user “kopite7kimi” Writes about new subsidiaries of the GA102 and G104 GPUs used in the GeForce RTX 3090, GeForce RTX 3080, GeForce RTX 3070, and GeForce RTX 3060 Ti.

Nvidia sells so-called Cryptocurrency Mining Processors (CMP), that is, acceleration cards with unrestricted regular GPUs, but no image output, to miners. For the first quarter of fiscal year 2022 (roughly the first quarter of 2021), Nvidia had already forecast a CMP sales drop of only $ 50 million. at In a statement, the company recently raised its forecast to $ 150 million Along with the best numbers in all other business areas.

(mma)