Nvidia's LHR limiter has been bypassed, enabling full mining performance

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Tudor Cibean

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What just happened? NiceHash's mining software can now bypass the mining limiter Nvidia put on LHR versions of its Ampere lineup, restoring the full mining performance to most GPUs. However, this might not be as bad as it sounds, as Ethereum is expected to soon switch to a Proof-of-Stake algorithm.

Over a year ago, Nvidia launched Lite Hash Rate (LHR) versions of most of its RTX 3000 lineup, which it designed to significantly reduce the mining performance for Ethereum and other GPU-minable cryptocurrencies.

Since then, miners have been trying to bypass this limiter with varying degrees of success. A couple of months ago, an unlocker tool was released that claimed to restore the full mining performance, but it turned out to be just malware.

Today, the developers of NiceHash, a company that provides mining software, have announced that they completely bypassed Nvidia's limiter and unlocked the full mining performance of LHR cards.

Several outlets have tested the newest QuickMiner release candidate and confirmed that it works. An unlocked RTX 3080 Ti can now readily get over 110 MH/s, whereas before, it was limited to about 80 MH/s.

However, there are a few caveats to it, as this method currently only works on Windows machines and supports only the DaggerHashimoto (Ethash) algorithm. It also doesn't work on GeForce RTX 3050 and GeForce RTX 3080 12GB cards, as these reportedly feature a new LHR algorithm.

Considering how bad the crypto market has been doing lately (Ethereum's price is currently half of its peak) and the improved availability and price of graphics cards, this news will probably not affect the market too much. With most cards, you'd need close to a year to break even, while Ethereum's transition to the Proof-of-Stake algorithm is expected to happen this year.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/94504-nvidia-lhr-limiter-has-bypassed-enabling-full-mining.html

 
That's interesting to see. I haven't tried any mining on my card for almost a year. Last time I tried Nicehash my LHR 3080 was getting around 55MH/s. I just tried nicehash again and without dinking around with anything I'm getting about 65MH/s.

Still not worth it, if you ask me. I'd much rather spend my time gaming with the card and not running it 24/7 to mine. Even if I got it up around 90MH/s (according to the image in the story) it wouldn't be worth it.

Nice effort by Nicehash, but it might be too little, too late.
 
Let's get our thinfoil hats on for a second: Just yesterday we read news of a major blow to Eth and it's viability as opensea ended up costing the Bored Ape investors (Or victims, depends on how you see things) more than half as much just in gas (a.k.a. transaction) fees than the actual NFTs they were trying to buy, sometimes unsuccessfully.

And this isn't even the only newsworthy note on troubles for NFTs recently and Eth's decline in price for the past few months shows this. So it is very convenient that as soon as a problem with extremely underwhelming availability of transaction processing on Eth to support just *one* major NFT project doing a launch, suddenly Nvidia's LHR algorithm is fully defeated: Just in time to try to cover some of the bad press from the botched opensea transactions to be countered to try and make sure GAS fees are a bit more sane like, maybe just 3 figure numbers instead of 4 figure numbers per transaction?

*thinfoil hat off now* This might momentarily affect pricing for Nvidia's GPUs that were nearing or in some cases at MSRP now but hey, AMD offerings on the other hand are sort of competitive now? So if you can't wait out the couple months this temporary set back in prices might cause you could get by with a 6600 xt instead of a 3060 or a 6700xt instead of a 3060ti for example.
 
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Υour Boys, the Miners, are having a party over at /u ETHER MINING as we speak and say that the PoS "Merge" will happen either in 2030 or 2300, take your pick.

Incidentally, I want to see the face of that fanatical rabid AMD fanboy that posts in here every time we have a Steam Survey press release and says that Radeon 6K GPUs aren't used for mining.

Foll. image courtesy of Your Boys from /u ETHER MINING.

izD2kgx.jpg
 
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Achaios said:
Υour Boys, the Miners, are having a party over at /u ETHER MINING as we speak and say that the PoS "Merge" will happen either in 2030 or 2300, take your pick.

Incidentally, I want to see the face of that fanatical rabid AMD fanboy that posts in here every time we have a Steam Survey press release and says that Radeon 6K GPUs aren't used for mining.

Foll. image courtesy of Your Boys from /u ETHER MINING.

izD2kgx.jpg
Click to expand...
That's all RX570/580 with a smattering of GTX1070, which puts in in the 2017 bubble. No RDNA2 there.
 
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Achaios said:
Wrong there's at least 1 MSI ARMOR Radeon RX 6600 8GB GDDR6 at the bottom left forefront of the picture and there's more over yonder.
Click to expand...
Bottom left corner (next to the yellow Zotac 1070), MSI Armor RX580. To the right of the 1070, MSI RX5XX. Under the Nitro RX570 is a Red Devil 5700 XT. No RDNA2.

Other than the 5700 XT, all AMD cards are RX followed by 3 digits - 580 or 570.
 
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passwordistaco said:
Bottom left corner (next to the yellow Zotac 1070), MSI Armor RX580. To the right of the 1070, MSI RX5XX. Under the Nitro RX570 is a Red Devil 5700 XT. No RDNA2.

Other than the 5700 XT, all AMD cards are RX followed by 3 digits - 580 or 570.
Click to expand...

No

s4eldkD.jpg
 
Achaios said:
No

s4eldkD.jpg
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What you can see on the picture is irrelevant. People are definitely using RDNA2 to mine on. It’s actually ridiculous to try and claim they aren’t being used in mining rigs. I’m not sure why AMD fanboys are making this claim but it’s pure bullshit. The 6000 series is actually quite power efficient at mining.
 
Don't like GPUs being used for mining but was never in favour of Nvidia limiting hash-rate on their GPUs simply because they should not get to dictate what you use your GPU for.
 
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This is nvidia fault for making ampere having too powerful compute though it doesn't beneficial for gaming.
But, I guess nvidia learnt from this and copies amd strategy of different architecture for gaming (ada lovelace) and compute (hopper) gpu.
 
QuantumPhysics said:
Just in time for Bitcoin $34,000!!!
Click to expand...
QuantumPhysics said:
Just in time for Bitcoin $34,000!!!
Click to expand...
Interesting as Fed increases interest rates and promises a 0.5 % rate hike monthly Bitcoin is a freefall. Rates are rumored to go up as high as 11% if not higher in just a year or so. If there is a direct correlation than expect BTC to go to 20k like some are predicting. While crypto currencies are marketed as a hedge against inflation the fed has their methods that are affecting all markets.
 
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zamroni111 said:
This is nvidia fault for making ampere having too powerful compute though it doesn't beneficial for gaming.
But, I guess nvidia learnt from this and copies amd strategy of different architecture for gaming (ada lovelace) and compute (hopper) gpu.
Click to expand...
I believe is a cost savings measure even though it doesn't seems like one: Nvidia basically works on a single core architecture. After they're done with it they actually develop both their enterprise/compute solutions in software to match and also their gaming features: I believe this is why Nvidia launched ray tracing and specially DLSS when they did which was a result of including tenser cores on the shared architecture since those were on demand for certain workstation/enterprise workloads and then find a way to take advantage of them on the gaming software suit like saying "Hey let's just use this ML compute power to implement stuff useful to gamers like Machine Learning based scaling tech"

Obviously I am greatly over-simplifying things here today but instead of having 2 separate lines of chips they develop one and then adapt needs on either side of the consumer or enterprise equation to utilize the hardware features regardless of the situation.

And in that regard well, miners really are just compute customers that have so much demand and so little actual requirements for compute than they can do as efficiently with consumer products, in fact even more so since expensive features like ECC memory for vram is not something that impacts hash rate so the consumer product is more cheaper since it's optimized for them better, by accident.
 
passwordistaco said:
"DEON" "580"
People may be mining on RDNA2, but this picture is from before RDNA2 was on the market.
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I don't know what that guy is trying to prove, except that he has eye sight issues or shilling for team green?

Of course people mine on Radeon too, but because nvidia owns about 85% of the market guess who sold the most GPUs to miners...?

These pathetic shills or brainwashed fanbois think we are all stupid or something... meh.
 
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Neatfeatguy said:
That's interesting to see. I haven't tried any mining on my card for almost a year. Last time I tried Nicehash my LHR 3080 was getting around 55MH/s. I just tried nicehash again and without dinking around with anything I'm getting about 65MH/s.

Still not worth it, if you ask me. I'd much rather spend my time gaming with the card and not running it 24/7 to mine. Even if I got it up around 90MH/s (according to the image in the story) it wouldn't be worth it.

Nice effort by Nicehash, but it might be too little, too late.
Click to expand...
Not worth it how? You'd mine in the off time, and you don't let your card mine hot (under 70C) which keeps it from any real degradation. You could be making an extra $500-1000 a year, depending on your electricity prices, the hashrate, and bitcoin prices. That would easily pay off the card and then some...
 
Looks like Nvidia is starting to panic over their thriving mining business and they should know better. Time to short crypto with 10x leverage if you ask me.
 
emmzo said:
Looks like Nvidia is starting to panic over their thriving mining business and they should know better. Time to short crypto with 10x leverage if you ask me.
Click to expand...
Um... it looks exactly the opposite... if they were panicking, they’d cripple their cards for mining a bit better... nvidia LOVES miners... they just don’t want too many people to know it... it’s bad press they don’t like!

As a company interested in making money, why should they care what people do with their cards?
 
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Squid Surprise said:
Um... it looks exactly the opposite... if they were panicking, they’d cripple their cards for mining a bit better... nvidia LOVES miners... they just don’t want too many people to know it... it’s bad press they don’t like!

As a company interested in making money, why should they care what people do with their cards?
Click to expand...
Not sure If Techspot covered the story
2 days ago source IGN, PCgamer
Nvidia Fined $5.5 Million For "Inadequate Disclosures" Of Sales To Crypto Miners
SEC cites that Nvidia misled how crypto miners were impacting the sale of its GPUs.

FYI
 
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