Posts Tagged ‘Nvidia CMP’

Should You Be Gaming or Crypto Mining with Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPUs

25, Feb 2021

Today, February 25th, marks the day that the newest mid-range GeForce gaming GPU from Nvidia is supposed to be released on the market and both crypto miners and gamers are eagerly anticipating this release. The release of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPU with 12GB of GDDR6 video memory is definitely an interesting event, but should gamers and miners be so enthusiastic about the new model? Well, neither gamers, nor miners will most likely be so happy after what they will see today - you can expect to see high prices and limited availability and the main reason for that is Ethereum mining of course.

Up until very recently crypto miners were expecting the new GeForce RTX 3060 GPU to be the next big thing in mining and more specifically in Ethereum (ETH) mining as the latest crypto mining craze is focused there. The GeForce RTX 3060 was supposed to be delivering around 40 MH/s mining hashrate at stock settings and up to about 45 MH/s hashrate after some tweaking… and it does manage to deliver that, but there is also a catch. Nvidia has decided to enforce hashrate limitation for the RTX 3060 via their video drivers in order to drive away miners and have the GPU available to gamers. So, instead of 40–45 MH/s hashrate for Ethereum mining users will be getting just around half of that at 20–22 MH/s and that is definitely not as attractive for such a high-priced video card.

What Nvidia did wrong here is announcing this software-enforced hashrate reduction in half just a few days before they release the new GeForce RTX 3060 GPU and that did not have a positive effect for sure. Most crypto miners still may not be aware of the reduced hashrate for Ethereum and a lot of them have already ordered the new GPU for building mining rigs with it. And because of the high interest from miners the prices are high and availability still a problem, so gamers are once more not too happy that they cannot get their hands on the new video cards or if they can the price is artificially inflated because of the miners’ interest in it.

Nvidia should have announced their plans much earlier than they did, so that miners will be well aware of that by the release on the market and will not bother buying these GPUs and thus the price and availability could’ve been much better for gamers. Now, crypto miners will be buying RTX 3060 GPUs in bulk at high price just to find out that their actual performance for Ethereum mining really sucks and is only half of what they expected and they will feel cheated. As a result, these GPUs will most likely be finding their way back to distributors and retailers and these companies will have hard time selling them to gamers due to the high initial price they got their stock at expecting miners to buy it.

It is not all lost for miners that got their hands on the new GeForce RTX 3060 GPU expecting high Ethereum mining hahsrate. No, you will not be able to get 40–45 MH/s mining Ethereum with these for now, unless a workaround is quickly discovered, if possible at all. Furthermore, the limitation extends not only to the most popular for mining Ethereum, it covers the whole Ethash algorithm that ETH among other crypto coins also use. Not to mention that the artificial limitation for the half performance of the actual one is not bound to a specific coin or algorithm such as Ethereum or Ethash. In fact, may if not all memory-intensive algorithms that have a way of working similar to that of Ethash used by Ethereum could also be affected as Nvidia uses an algorithm to detect a specific behaviour for the GPU to know if it is mining or not.

It is already known that VertCoin (VTC) and its VertHash crypto algorithm is also affected and you will be getting similar drop in performance with the RTX 3060 GPU. It is not all lost however as RavenCoin (RVN) for instance does work normally for mining on the RTX 3060 and manages to deliver a good performance with over 20 MH/s hashrate with power optimized settings and with a bit of overclocking even around 22 MH/s with just 120W of power usage. Mining other crypto coins that use GPU-intensive Proof of Work mining algorithms will also most likely be problem free as far as getting the actual performance the RTX 3060 is capable of instead of the artificially reduced hashrate to half of what it is supposed to be.

There are some other currently profitable crypto coins available for mining that might be doing quite well on the new RTX 3060 GPU, besides Ravencoin and its KAWPOW algorithm of course. You should check out crypto coins that use algorithms like MTP, CuckooCycle, Cucatoo31, Cucatoo32, Cucatoo29s, Zhash, ProgPow, ZelHash, EquihashZero, ProgPowZ, BeamHashIII, X25X and others. That of course would need some testing first, but there is a good potential to still maximizing the performance that the GeForce RTX 3060 has for crypto mining even when you take out Ethereum from the picture. A lot of people however will probably not even bother trying out something different than mining Ethereum, especially people new to crypto mining that know only of Ethereum mining as a profitable thing to do.

You can never say that crypto and crypto mining is a boring thing to do, especially if you are not one of those people that just want the easiest way around in making money mining and are not really interested in cryptocurrencies… If you are reading this now, then you most likely aren’t one of these people anyway.

– More on the Limited Mining Hashrate of the GeForce RTX 3060…

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 is Indeed Limited for Crypto Mining

22, Feb 2021

It seems that Nvidia did manage to keep their promise to make the new GeForce RTX 3060 GPU limited for crypto mining and thus widely available for gamers as with reduced performance it will not be attractive for miners. We got some sound information regarding the actual performance for mining use for the new GeForce RTX 3060 that is expected to be available starting February 25th or in just a few days. According to Nvidia the new video drivers for the RTX 3060 GPUs are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and will limit the hashrate, or cryptocurrency mining performance to half of what they will normally do. Essentially you will be getting half the hashrate you normally would if the card is running at full performance meaning that instead of the expected hashrate for RTX 3060 in the range of 40-45 MH/s for Ethereum with stock settings and optimized, so with the drivers cutting that in half we were expecting only 20-22.5 MH/s.

It seems that the reality is not that far off from what we were expecting with an MSI GeForce RTX 3060 GAMING X video card apparently starting up with a hashrarte of about 41 MH/s for Ethereum mining with stock settings with 100% TDP. With fans running at automatic settings the MSI GPU runs at around 58% fans and 51 degrees Celsius temperature for the GPU with 117W of power usage. When the miner starts the hashrate quickly drops from 41 to about 21 MH/s, so pretty much in half and even if you close the miner and start it again it starts with the lower hashrate. You need to reboot the PC and then when you run the miner for Ethereum for the first time it will start at 41 MH/s again, but quickly drop that in half again.

With reduced TDP and GPU frequency and overclocked video memory to +1000 MHz in MSI Afterburner the hashrate starts at 45-46 MH/s, but then again very shortly it drops down to about 25 MH/s or once more it is cut in half. So, pretty much what we expected even before we got a confirmation on the actual hashrate that the RTX 3060 GPUs are capable of, though cut in half by the Nvidia driver as a means to drive away crypto miners from that particular video card and also for Nvidia to sell their new line of professional crypto mining products to miners – the Nvidia CMP HX Dedicated Crypto Mining GPUs.

The good news is that already released Nvidia RTX 30 Series GPUs are not affected by this limitation, so only the new RTX 3060 will be limited in half in terms of mining performance. Or to be more specific limited to half Ethereum mining performance by the drivers as apparently other mining algorithms are not affected like ETH is. This means that although the RTX 3060 may not be a popular option for Ethereum mining it could still be a good option for mining other crypto currencies such as Ravencоin (RVN) or VertCoin (VTC).

A quick update regarding the situation with VertCoin (VTC) mining on the new RTX 3060 GPUs… it seems that the VertHash algorithm is also affected from the half hashrate drop that Ethash is experiencing, probably other memory0intensive crypto mining algorithms will be affected as well. Ravencoin’s (RVN) use of KAWPOW and probably ProgPOW as well do not seem to be suffering from reduced hashrate like Ethash and VertHash though, you should be getting 21 MH/s or more for RVN mining. So, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 is not fully limited for mining use, but some of the most profitable mining algorithms at the moment are apparently affected from this! Although the above information was initially verified to be true for Windows mining, it seems that under Linux with an OS like SimpleMining (SMOS) the situation with the limited hashrate on the RTX 3060 is also the same and you get half the hashrate mining Ethereum.

Nvidia Announced the CMP HX Dedicated GPUs for Professional Crypto Mining

18, Feb 2021

 

For crypto users around the world, it is very important comparing Coinbase and Gemini because they will certainly make the difference when working.

The latest news from Nvidia are quite interesting for both crypto miners and gamers, as apparently the company is taking drastic measures to make gaming GPUs available to gamers. With the upcoming launch of the new GeForce RTX 3060 video cards on February 25th the company wants to make sure that the new graphics adapters will be available to gamers and will not be purchased in bulk by crypto miners. The video drivers for the RTX 3060 GPUs are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and will limit the hashrate, or cryptocurrency mining performance, by around 50 percent. So, essentially you will be getting half the hashrate you normally would if the card is running at full performance. For mining the expected hashrate for RTX 3060 was in the range of 40-45 MH/s for Ethereum stock and with overclocked memory, so with the drivers cutting that in half you will be getting only 20-22.5 MH/s making the high priced RTX 3060 GPUs unattractive for miners, or that is what Nvidia believes will happen with this active action hey are taking.

Here come the Nvidia CMP HX Dedicated Crypto Mining GPUs as a solution to the problem, or at least what the green company thinks they have figured out. Nvidia will try to offer separate products dedicated for crypto mining and more specifically for Ethereum (ETC) mining for the crypto miners. The NVIDIA CMP, or, Cryptocurrency Mining Processor, product line for professional mining which does not do graphics (no video outputs) and thus should not impact the availability of GeForce GPUs to gamers.

Nvidia has announced 4 products in their new CMP dedicated crypto mining GPUs with two available in Q1 this year and the other two scheduled for Q2 this year. The Nvidia CMP 30HX mining GPU should be capable of 26 MH/s at 125W power usage and will come with 6GB and the Nvidia CMP 40HX will provide 36 MH/s at 185W of power usage and will come with 8GB video memory. These are the first two models planned for the first quarter of the year, the second quarter is for Nvidia CMP 50HX with 45 MH/s at 250W and 10GB VRAM and Nvidia CMP 90HX with 86 MH/s at 320W and 10GB VRAM.

These initially announced specifications for the mining GPUs are probably not going to be as interesting as Nvidia expects them to be, unless they do come at a significantly lower price compared to what the GeForce RTX GPUs currently cost. For reference an RTX 3060 Ti or RTX 3070 currently does 60 MH/s with 120-140W of power usage when optimized and at stock 200-220W they do 50+ MH/s. This essentially makes 30HX, 40HX and 50HX not really attractive unless they come much cheaper, so only the 90HX seems more interesting out of the four cards that should be based on the RTX 3080 and should be with GDDR6X memory unlike the rest of the CMP line. RTX 3080 is really hard to find currently, but it is no wonder considering the fact that it does about 95 MH/s with 240W of power usage when properly optimized, so again much better than the listed official specs of 90HX. Nvidia RTX 3090 optimized can manage to deliver about 120 MH/s with about 300W of power usage.

We’ll have to wait and see what comes on the market and what will be the prices and availability of the new CPM product line from Nvidia in order to get a better idea if the company made a good decision or something half-though and late like they did with the mining series back in 2017. It is quite possible that they did not thing everything well enough this time either, but let us not get ahead of the things and wait to see what the actual products will be and if Nvidia just set them at conservative settings and they will be capable of further optimizations or their performance will not be as attractive as desktop GPUs and people will continue to prefer them instead of dedicated mining products. The warranty period is also an important factor here, so the idea is to see normal warranty, not just 3- or 6-months warranty like the last time…

– More on the official page of the NVIDIA CMP HX Dedicated GPU for Professional Mining…


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