One of the Ethereum miners was able to finally eliminate the software hashrate restrictions set by Nvidia and launch a farm of seven GeForce RTX 3060 video cards.
In February, GPU maker Nvidia announced that it would release a custom driver that would halve the hashrate of RTX 3060 graphics cards, to around 21 MH / s. This was done to reduce the demand of miners for such video cards in order to keep them for gamers. In return, miners will be issued cards based on specialized CMP chips. However, these cards are less efficient, since they are made on chips of the previous generation, and most of them will go straight from the factory to industrial miners.
In early March, Nvidia released an “experimental” driver for the 3000 series cards. Almost immediately, the miners discovered that on the RTX 3060 with this driver, you can mine ETH at a normal speed of about 46 Mh / s, the video card could even overclock up to 50 MH / s. Then the company stated that it accidentally released a driver without a built-in hashrate limit for mining. However, with this driver, only one video card in the system was able to run. Dreams of farms of 6-7 or more cards were far from being realized.
But by April 1, some miners were able to completely bypass the security mechanism using an HDMI dongle and other not yet published tricks. Even with a dongle in mining, only video cards connected directly to the PCI Express slot on the motherboard could work. Some miners were able to fix this problem as well.
One user posted a photo showing seven GeForce RTX 3060 cards connected through risers. However, the miner did not say how he managed to avoid the established restrictions. The owner of the farm said that the total consumption of these video cards is 1020 watts, while his daily income is about $ 32, taking into account the cost of electricity. He could use the more expensive and less flexible x16-x16 risers and a specialized motherboard, which greatly increases the cost of the farm. However, mining with seven RTX 3060s in one rig is still possible.
Recently competing with Nvidia AMD announced that it does not plan to limit mining on its video cards, but only optimizes their architecture for gamers. As a result, AMD graphics cards will become less efficient in mining, as it requires high memory bandwidth. Perhaps, over time, miners will bypass this “optimization” too.
