It's been almost a whole year since their initial release, but the LHR (low hash rate) versions of Nvidia's RTX 30 series graphics cards have finally been fully unlocked by mining software called Nicehash, restoring mining capabilities. respective to each card.
It's been nearly impossible to find most of the best graphics cards available to buy in recent years due to global chip shortages, a broader supply chain crisis at ports around the world, and demand for consumer technologies that they put even more pressure on the availability of semiconductors that AMD and Nvidia need for their products.
Some of this demand also included crypto miners who were buying up the available stock of popular GPUs in droves during the height of the recent cryptocurrency boom. And while there were divided opinions on how this affected general availability for gamers and build enthusiasts, the love was certainly not lost between the two groups, leading Team Green to implement measures to make their graphics cards of consumption less desirable to those hoping to use it to mine currencies like Ethereum.
Almost all of the RTX 3000 series of cards were re-released with hash rate limiters (excluding the GeForce RTX 3090 as it was deemed too expensive to appeal to the mining market), which limited their ability to mine currencies like ETH, but several of they were quickly defeated, with some software capable of unlocking cards with 70-80% efficiency in weeks.
As reported by WCCFTech, NiceHash has now announced that you can use 100% of the available mining speeds using these previously restricted Ampere series cards, stating on their website that:
"We are pleased to announce that NiceHash QuickMiner (Excavator) is the first mining software that FULLY UNLOCKS (100%) LHR cards. Now you can make more profit than any other mining software on the market if you use LHR graphics cards. With NiceHash QuickMiner ".
We don't have an LHR model GPU to verify this claim ourselves, so take the claim with a grain of salt, but it's also worth noting that GPU stock levels and pricing are currently at better numbers than we've seen for many. months. , so you're unlikely to fight swarms of competition if the maps are viable for mining again.
Analysis: Don't worry, no, seriously
This news is unlikely to cause another graphics card shortage or even increase the price of currently available stock, for a number of different reasons. The main piece of good news for gamers is that Ethereum, the second most popular cryptocurrency in the world after Bitcoin, went to proof-of-stake at the end of 2021.
Let me explain. Proof of Work is a system where computers compete to be the first to solve complex puzzles, leaving open the possibility for miners to use warehouses full of consumer graphics cards to solve these puzzles, thus earning ETH. Instead, Proof of Stake uses validators to find a block based on the number of tokens they hold, eliminating the need to solve these "puzzles."
This shift from a proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake model eliminated much of the demand for graphics cards, where Ethereum was previously the largest cryptocurrency mined primarily on graphics cards (Bitcoin has been primarily mined on ASICs in recent years ) , now it is inefficient to do so.
Of course, there are other coins available that still use a proof-of-work system, but these don't have the same market control that ETH did last year, so unless another crypto starts to skyrocket in value, it will take time. to see how a similar situation develops.
This shouldn't really affect consumers trying to buy a new graphics card in any way, even if it means that LHR versions of GPUs no longer serve the same purpose. Hopefully, Nvidia continues to develop its hashrate limiting technology in case we see a similar scenario when it launches its Lovelace series of graphics cards to act as a deterrent.
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