NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 LHR Series Mining Performance Partially Unlocked With NBMiner Update, Up To 70% of Maximum Hashrate

A new update published by NBMiner seems to have partially bypassed NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30 LHR series mining hash rate limit. In the changelog, NBMiner reports that users can unlock up to 70% of the maximum hash rate on their LHR graphics cards which could push miners to purchase the LHR series, hence leading to another supply shortage.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 LHR series was introduced to limit the mining hash rate on the entire gaming graphics card lineup. This was done as miners were gobbling up entire stocks of GeForce RTX 30 series GPUs due to their great mining capabilities. This led to a huge shortage of gaming graphics cards which consequently led to higher prices within the retail segment. It is only now that we are seeing the market recover and prices of gaming graphics cards return to normal.

However, NBMiner with its latest update might change that. NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30 LHR series is based on an entirely different Ampere SKU range. You can see the changelog below for NBMiner's v39.0:

feature: ethash New LHR mode for ETH mining on NVIDIA RTX 30 series LHR GPUs, supports Windows & Linux, able to get ~70% of maximum unlocked hashrate.

This mode can be tuned by argument -lhr, only works for ethash right now.

-lhr default to 0, meaning even if -lhr is not set, LHR mode with -lhr 68 will be applied to LHR GPUs if certain GPUs are detected.

Tune LHR mode by setting -lhr , a specific value will tell miner try to reach value percent of maximum unlocker hashrate, e.g. -lhr 68 will expect to get 68% of hashrate for same model non-LHR GPU.

Higher -lhr value will results in higher hashrate, but has higher possibility to run into lock state, which will leads to much less hashrate.

A good start tuning value is 68, which has been tested to be stable on most rig configurations.

-lhr value can be set for each GPU by using comma separeted list, -lhr 65,68,0,-1, where -1 means turn off LHR mode.

Currently, LHR graphics cards deliver half the total hash rate that they are intended to but with the new update, you can set this value to 68% (as the developer recommends). This only works in Ethereum (ethash algorithm) but there's a good possibility now that other mining algorithms might also adopt it. An average of around 70% is definitely not perfect but it's also not as bad as the 50% mining limit. Even this gain can prompt miners to once again purchase gaming (LHR) GPUs and can affect the availability and prices of LHR GPUs in the future.

This new LHR mode mining update for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series is compatible with both Linux & Windows systems on existing NVIDIA drivers. Based on the changelog, it looks like the developers are also working to make this unlock work on other mining algorithms.

News Source: Videocardz