It appears NVIDIA is taking the problems cryptocurrency miners cause in gaming graphics card stock very seriously, and although its first attempt to curb miners’ interest in its graphics cards was a fiasco, the company continues to insist and will present what it has. called “Familia LHR” (light hash rate), a new series of graphics cards that will come with limitations for mining.
RTX 3060 is again limited to mining
A few days after the news broke that NVIDIA was working on the LHR (Lite Hash Rate) GPU line for its GeForce RTX 30 gaming graphics cards, the team in green confirmed that their limited hash will be sent from the mid-May. The company’s latest WHQL driver (GeForce 466.27) confirms this in its changelog.
According to NVIDIA, the latest driver updates the GeForce RTX 3060 12GB hash rate limiter and will be mandatory for all products shipped from mid-May. So we find two takeaways: the existing RTX 3060 graphics cards will once again stall in the crypto mining arena when users update their drivers, and second, the new variants based on the Ampere chips. GAXX2 will require this version of the driver to function. .
For those users who don’t use their graphics card to mine at all, this is good news, as they won’t be affected. However, users who use their GPU to mine cryptocurrencies will be forced to get stuck in the previous drivers so as not to lose the hash rate which will adversely affect their in-game performance (this in case they are using their GPU for playing. but also for mining when they are not playing).
The new graphics cards that NVIDIA will theoretically launch from mid-May will have GAXX2 chips and come with Resizable BAR support out of the box (currently, users with RTX 30 series graphics must update the vBIOS to use this function). As we said, these new GPUs will ship from mid-May, so we can expect graphics with these new chips to start appearing on store shelves around the beginning of June. this year.
The new hash rate of NVIDIA RTX 30 Lite
The specifications and prices of this new set of RTX 30 LHR graphics will in principle not change from the existing ones. To know if you have an LHR or a normal GPU, you will have to disassemble the graphic to be able to access the GPU and see the name silkscreened on the die, so that you can see if the chip is part of the GAXX2 line series or not. It is also to be expected that monitoring software such as GPU-Z will be able to see it at the software level, but we will have to wait for an update to confirm this.
Here are the new NVIDIA Ampere SKUs we can expect from these GAXX2 chips:
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 – GA102-300-A1 -> GA102-302-A1
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 – GA102-200-A1 -> GA102-202-A1
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 – GA104-300-A1 -> GA104-302-A1
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti – GA104-200-A1 -> GA104-202-A1
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 – GA106-300-A1 -> GA106-302-A1
Also, updating to an old BIOS on newer graphics will not work because the hardware ID will be different; this means that there is an additional parameter besides the driver which will prevent the GPU from bypassing the NVIDIA hash rate limitation.