NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 LHR Graphics Cards Tested In Ethereum Mining With Updated NBMiner

August 16, 2021 John Ethereum 0

A few hours ago, we reported how the latest NBMiner update had partially unlocked the mining hash rate on NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 30 LHR series graphics cards. The first mining numbers are in and show that these cards are actually delivering up to 70% of their mining capability within the Etherum (ethash) mining algorithm.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 LHR Series Graphics Cards Tested In Ethereum Mining With Latest NBMiner

The three main NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 LHR series graphics cards that are shown in the tests are all ‘Ti’ variants, the RTX 3080 Ti, RTX 3070 Ti, and RTX 3060 Ti. As expected, the latest NBMiner updates have partially unlocked (up to 70%) mining performance of these cards and while it’s still not at 100 percent, it’s better than the 50% hash rate that miners were getting prior to this update. NBMiner is also expecting to unlock higher performance in the coming updates but that remains to be seen.

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

So coming to the performance numbers, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti delivers around 65 MH/s. The standard RTX 3080 delivered around 90 MH/s (without tweaks). The RTX 3080 Ti comes with a larger memory bus and higher bandwidth so we are looking at around 60-65% performance of the RTX 3080 here. The NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti fares slightly better and delivers around 50 MH/s while the RTX 3070 delivered around 60 MH/s. Moving over to the RTX 3060 Ti, we get around 40 MH/s which is 20 MH/s lower than the non-LHR variant and 10 MH/s lower than the RTX 3060 (Non-Ti) which is rated at 50 MH/s. Following are the numbers in the list view:

  • NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti (LHR) – ~65 MH/s (RTX 3080 Non-LHR – ~90 MH/s)
  • NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti (LHR) – ~50 MH/s (RTX 3070 Non-LHR – ~60 MH/s)
  • NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti (LHR) – ~40 MH/s (RTX 3060 Non-LHR – ~50 MH/s)

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.

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. While this is good news for miners, it isn’t actually good news for the gaming segment which has only now started seeing some recovery in terms of supply, availability, and overall prices. This update can potentially lead to a surge in demand for LHR graphics cards which could lead to an even worse gaming GPU shortage.