Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate and Unveils New ‘CMP’ cards to stop crypto miners from buying gaming GPUs

Nvidia RTX 3060 being Nerfed for Crypto Miners 

We can see that gamers and miners are equivalently interested in getting their hands-on latest graphics cards. And Nvidia wants to please both the groups. They do so by nerfing the upcoming RTX 3060 graphics card’s ability to mine efficiently and make a mining-specific silicon product. This way they think they will handle the criticism for developing products only to the crypto crowd. 

As the craze for mining in cryptocurrencies is increasing so are demands for the graphic cards like RTX 3060 that miners tend to buy to empower their ever-growing operations. Some tend to show off by adjusting mobile mining farms in the trunk of their expensive sports cars, RGB, and all to tease the gaming community. 

Profits for Tech Companies 

Although these chipmakers companies like Nvidia and AMD tend to satisfy such demands as seen in the past but the situation is different from the situation seen a few years ago. This time every person has been working from home and staying from home and are finding brand new ways to entertain themselves. This has put additional pressure on the tech industry’s supply chain, leading to a lot of scalping and higher prices for computer hardware.

And Companies have been under benefit from this increased demands and prices and they haven’t been thinking much for consumers requirements. But Nvidia aims to satisfy gamers and miners equally. The very first step taken by Nvidia is nerfing RTX 3060 in terms of hash rates for popular mining algorithms, in the hopes that it will become less attractive for miners and in turn put more cards “in the hands of gamers.”

50% efficiency Reduced 

For example, if someone is running an Ethereum mining Algorithm then the card’s driver will be able to detect it and lower the mining efficiency to 50 percent. These performance restrictions will be applied to both Windows and Linux drivers, which means that even using custom Linux distributions like NiceHash OS or Hive OS won’t work to restore full compute capabilities for mining purposes. Questions were raised over whether this supposedly unbackable limiter would also affect other Ampere-based cards running the same driver, but the company has confirmed it is not limiting the performance of GPUs already sold. 

Apart from nerfing RTX 3060, for the mining, they have CMP HX products that will feature silicon that has no video outputs and is optimized for mining efficiency. 4 configurations for the product will be launched ranging from 6GB to 10GB VRAM reaching up to 86 MH per second in Ethereum mining algorithms. Power consumptions can go a max of 320 watts for 86 MH per second to as low as 120 watts for 26 MH per second.

But it is still unclear whether Nvidia will get profits from this idea as to whether customers will love it or not. 

What for Miners?

It is expected that RTX 3060 will be the best selling in the series of RTX 3000 and additionally limiting mining efficiency will be considered a welcome move that can be cracked with time as being a software lock. But releasing that whether Nvidia wants to bring something mining-specific keeping in mind likeliness of reduction in demand of customer versions leading to more waste generation.