Cryptominers say they got an Nvidia’s RTX 3060 video card working at full speed. Nvidia has provided the card with restrictions that would halve the hashrate when mining ethereum, but that seems to have been circumvented.
On Guru3d’s forum, a user says that he can run his MSI RTX 3060 Gaming X with Nvidia’s developer driver at full speed in crypto mining client T-REX. It concerns the Nvidia WSL driver beta with version number 470.05. No changes have been made to the driver or the bios of the video card. Some users say in the topic that this does not work with their RTX 3060 video card, but others confirm that it does.
PC Watch has confirmed that the mining restrictions of the RTX 3060 have been circumvented, but the Japanese website does not publish the method. The site says no driver, bios, or video card modifications are required, which could indicate using the aforementioned Nvidia driver.
Last week, several reports appeared from ethereum miners claiming that they had gotten an RTX 3060 working at full speed. VideoCardz made an overview of this. If there is indeed a driver available that allows mining at full speed, Nvidia can no longer prevent that. The manufacturer can release a new driver, but miners can simply continue to use the old driver.
Nvidia announced just before the introduction of the RTX 3060 that the hashrate for mining Ethereum would be halved. That should make the card less interesting for crypto miners and therefore more available to gamers. Nevertheless, like other video cards, the RTX 3060 is not for sale at prices that are somewhat close to the suggested retail price. The scarce available copies are sold for considerable additional prices.
Update, 15:59: HardwareLuxx and ComputerBase also confirm that the RTX 3060’s ethereum hashrate is not limited when the said beta driver is used. The title of the article has been adjusted accordingly.
Update 2, 16:35: A crypto mining blog claims that the limitation is only removed if one RTX 3060 card is used. As soon as several cards are combined, the restriction would still come into effect. Others have not yet confirmed this.