SMH … it was bound to happen, just to spite Nvidia. This makes Nvidia’s announcement for limiting mining capabilities on the RTX 3060 … pointless!
Taken from Videocardz … Two German publications have now confirmed that simply by using a special driver, the Ethereum limiter appears to be nonfunctional.
NVIDIA announced that their new mid-range RTX 3060 graphics card will have a built-in anti cryptocurrency mining firmware that will automatically reduce the mining hash rate by 50%. NVIDIA confirmed that this technology does not only work on the software level, but also on the hardware level. Bryan Del Rizzo claimed that there is a secure handshake between the driver and the BIOS that ‘prevents removal of the hash rate limiter’. This today has been confirmed as untrue.
Following PC Watch reports, HardwareLuxx and ComputerBase now both confirm that by using the GeForce 470.05 driver, the Ethereum hash rate limiter is not working. It was earlier claimed that by using a special BIOS and driver the limiter can easily be removed. As it turns out, the hash rate can already be removed simply by replacing the driver alone, without the necessity to flash a new firmware. The driver is available through a BETA program and it is not available publically.
It has been later reported that the driver removes the limiter only for the primary card in multi-GPU systems. What this means is that if multiple RTX 3060 are installed in the system, the driver will uncap the hash rate only for one card.
ComputeBase confirms
The website confirmed that by using the GeForce 470.05 driver which is distributed by NVIDIA to developers under Windows Insider Program, the Ethereum limiter is not working. The hash rate does not drop over time, which was basically how this technology was intended to work:
ComputerBase can confirm that only the beta driver GeForce 470.05 distributed by Nvidia to developers and via the Windows Insider Program ensures that the performance of the GeForce RTX 3060 in the Ethereum algorithm no longer drops. A BIOS update is not necessary. — ComputerBase.de
Source: Videocardz
