Nvidia LHR v3: Mining performance increased

LHR is an abbreviation for Nvidia graphics cards for lower mining performance when mining Ethereum. After NiceHash released the majority of graphics cards from their software restrictions earlier this month, the LHR v3 GPUs are now at least 90% unlocked.

Since its release, Nvidia graphics cards from the Ampere series have been exceedingly expensive, reaching stratospheric heights of between twice and three times their suggested retail price in conjunction with the cryptocurrency Ethereum.

This is primarily owing to the fast GDDR6X memory and the comparatively high efficiency of the graphics cards in the Ethereum Dagger Hashimoto algorithm.

However, because miners, as opposed to players, require a large number of graphics cards, Nvidia has noticed the issue and has been experimenting with mining locks since the Geforce RTX 3060.

The lock on the first version of the RTX 3060 (v1) was rapidly broken using its own driver, and soon after, low hash rate cards (LHR v2) were produced, which limited their mining performance on the software side using a specific algorithm.

Except for the Geforce RTX 3090, all versions were affected; the new RTX 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti are only available as LHR models. Even if this is solely related to Ethereum, this lock lasted a long time and was only broken this month.

The only cards that were restricted at the time were the Geforce RTX 3080 12 GiB and the RTX 3050. Because both models are very young, they rely on LHR v3. However, Toms Hardware is now stating that the miners have made a breakthrough.

Meanwhile, the Nice Hash engineers have discovered 90 percent of the mining potential of these devices, which was previously limited to 50 percent.

Fortunately, with Ethereum prices currently below $2,000 per ether, this development comes too late for gamers to force graphics card prices to climb again.