Initial tests prove the efficiency of the LHR mining limiter on the new Nvidia RTX 3060 and RTX 3080 Ti SKUs

The previous blunders occurring with the first RTX 3060 GPUs that were supposed to cut crypto mining performance in half have apparently taught Nvidia a good lesson, as the upcoming Lite Hash Rate (LHR) models are reportedly immune to any hacking, at least for the time being. This is based on the first reports coming from China, where the new GA106-302 SKU with LHR has been available for a few weeks now. According to an article published on the Expreview site, the latest RTX 3060 version features a new PCI Device ID that is not recognized by older drivers, and the crypto miner limiter now works as intended.

Expreview tested a ZOTAC RTX 3060 LHR Apocalypse GOC model and first of all shows how the new cards have the same gaming performance as the non-LHR cards. However, the mining performance has been essentially halved. Compared to the first RTX 3060 versions that were mining at 40 MH/s, the LHR variants provide Ethereum mining speeds of only 20-22 MH/s at 119 W. Videocardz also notes that the RTX 3080 Ti models should also come with the LHR limiter, which allows for only 58 MH/s at 299 W, but this has not yet been documented by any thorough review.

Moving forward, Nvidia and all its AIB partners will exclusively release GPUs featuring the LHR limiter, including the RTX 3080 / Ti, RTX 3070 / Ti, and the RTX 3060 / Ti SKUs. Nvidia did not bother to add the limiter on the RTX 3090 cards since these have a terrible price/performance ratio for miners, especially now when all GPUs are overpriced. Provided the LHR SKUs do not get hacked by release date, prices and GPU stocks should slowly start to normalize.

Buy the MSI Gaming GeForce RTX 3060 12GB on Amazon