Nvidia’s RTX 3060 might be considered a low-end graphics card to PC gamers, but it is overwhelmingly popular with cryptocurrency miners – specifically those who mine Ethereum.
The only downside so far has been a superficial hash rate limit Nvidia imposed on the 3060 chipset.
“We’re limiting the hash rate of GeForce RTX 3060 GPUs, so they’re less desirable to miners and launching NVIDIA CMP for professional mining,” said Nvidia in a blog last month.
Nvidia may have forced this limit to make more products available for gamers, since both crypto miners and scalpers alike have seemed to scrounge up the remaining supplies, making nearly every new RTX model scarce.
This attempt at throttling the hash limit was short lived as miners in China found a bypass method using a custom mod.
According to Benzinga, screenshots posted by a Twitter account that documents tech leaks depicted a stack of eight RTX 3060 graphics cards operating at far above NVIDIA’s imposed 20-25 MH/s mining limit.
https://twitter.com/I_Leak_VN/status/1369554230701297667
A group of Ethereum miners from Vietnam also confirmed the 3060 is able to hit 50 MH/s.
More from Benzinga:
"Recognizing the popularity of cryptocurrency mining, NVIDIA had planned to launch Cryptocurrency Mining Processors (CMP) to address the specific needs of Ethereum mining.
"'With CMP, we can help miners build the most efficient data centers while preserving GeForce RTX GPUs for gamers,' stated the company.
"However, it seems that cryptocurrency miners have continued to use GeForce RTX 3060 as their mining chip of choice, bypassing NVIDIA’s deliberate restrictions in hash rate."