Nvidia plans to ship "Lite Hash Rate" RTX 3000 GPUs with improved anti-mining measures in mid-May

According to a report coming from Videocardz, Nvidia has recently notified its AIB partners on the upcoming GAxx2 chips that are supposed to integrate more reliable crypto mining limiters. Additionally, these Lite Hash Rate revisions will support ResizableBAR out of the box, without any need for a vBIOS update. Nvidia plans to start shipping the first LHR chips by mid-May, and retailers should hopefully have fresh batches of cards some time in June.

Apparently, Nvidia is instructing AIB partners to include no particular LHR branding for the upcoming revisions. All new cards will retain current product denominations and, initially, the only way to distinguish LHR cards from non-LHR is by stripping the coolers and inspecting the SKU codes on the chips. However, these cards are said to include new PCI Device IDs that can only be recognized by new drivers, so specialized GPU monitoring and testing tools will eventually detect the exact SKU plus the ReBAR feature.

Nvidia did not provide too many details regarding the exact way in which the crypto mining limiter is supposed to work. It did, however, mention that the gaming performance will not be affected in a negative way. Team Green is probably trying to be more discrete this time, seeing how well things turned out with the RTX 3060 software limiter. Previous models, including the RTX 3060 / Ti, 3070 and 3080 plus the upcoming 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti should get the LHR feature. Things are not exactly clear when it comes to the RTX 3090. A Videocardz source claims that this model might not feature the improved anti-mining measures, but it should at least get the ReBAR update.

While solving the crypto mining problem could appear as a decent step towards fixing the GPU shortages, we are not sure if these particular measures can have a relevant impact when scalpers and the global chip shortages are still threatening the supply integrity.

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