Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 With Full Unrestricted ETH Mining Hashrate, But Only With Single GPU in a Gaming PC
It seems that a workaround to the artificially enforced hashrate limiter for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPUs mining Ethereum has been discovered and it is pretty simple apparently. You just need to use the developer driver version 470.05 where there is apparently no hashrate limiting being applied, unlike with the regular GeForce video driver that you would normally download for these video cards. This has been reported by some users and we can confirm that it is indeed working and you can get the full mining hashrate for Ethereum with this driver, however there is still a catch… read on below with the latest updates on what and how it works.
We are getting 47 MH/s Ethash mining hashrate using the Nvidia developer driver version 470.05 with PhoenixMiner mining Ethereum, with the following settings in MSI Afterburner: 70% TDP, -500 MHz GPU, +1000 MHz video memory. You can check what performance does a Asus ROG Strix GeForce RTX 3060 OC Edition manage to provide you with with the limited hashrate regular drivers, though the limit is not for all crypto algorithms, but for memory-intensive ones such as Ethash and VertHash for instance.
The drawback is that the Nvidia developer driver version 470.05 does require you to register on the Nvidia website as developer and is currently still available for Windows only, but hey, it works and you get the full mining hashrate mining Ethereum and other algorithms such as Verthash used by Vertcoin that apparently also suffered from the hashrate limitation introduced by Nvidia for the RTX 3060. For VTC mining with the above settings the hashrate we are getting is around 810 KH/s instead of the reduced in half sub-400 with the regular driver.
Update: It seems that this “workaround” is still somewhat limited to just when using a single RTX 3060 GPU connected to a monitor, with more GPUs in a mining rig it does not seem to work for full hashrate on all of the video cards…
Further researching into the matter with a single RTX 3060 GPU working with unrestricted hashrate, while multiple ones not working has revealed that there seem to be some conditions met. Having a single RTX 3060 GPU connected on a ?8/x16 PCI-E slot (no extenders) and a monitor connected to it. This makes us believe that Nvidia did not in fact forget to implement the protection in the latest developer driver 370.05, but has instead further improved their protection mechanism instead. What they could’ve done is to detect that you are using a single video card in a gaming setup and then no limitations, even for mining will be enforced, while if more GPUs on a slower PCI-E interface are present then this is a mining rig and the hashrate will be reduced.
– To download the Nvidia developer driver version 470.05 (free registration required)…
Text source: Crypto Mining Blog
