Crypto Mining Blog

Just like the more recently released Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 that came with mining hashrate limiter enforced by Nvidia, the new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti also came out “with a reduced Ethereum hash rate” making them less desirable for miners. The just released Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is almost equivalent in terms of specifications to an RTX 3090 GPU, but with half the video memory, so only 12GB GDDR6X instead of the full 24GB. For the new RTX 3080 Ti in terms of CUDA cores there is a very slight reduction and memory clocks too, but the memory bus remains 384-bit, so in theory performance wise it should be very similar to an RTX 3090 and that goes not only for mining, but for gaming as well. There is the Ethereum hashrate limiter however that messes things up a bit for miners, but not for gamers and the reduced in half video memory should also be making it more affordable and more available to gamers compared to RTX 3080… in theory.

Trying to mine Ethereum (ETH) at stock settings for the RTX 3080 Ti shows a starting hashrate at about 100 MH/s that quickly drops down to around 53-55 MH/s with the default setting due to the enforced hashrate limiter for mining ETH by Nvidia. The default settings for the RTX 3080 Ti from Palit/Gainward we have tried give us 325W of power usage as reported by the miner. And although Nvidia talks about limiting Ethereum mining hahsrate other similar memory intensive mining algorithms may also be affected as well as we have seen already with the RTX 3060 GPUs that were the first to introduce the hashrate limiting solution by Nvidia.

Going for optimized settings to reduce power consumption for 265W and have higher hashrate (if there was no hashrate limiter in play) give us slightly lower starting hashrate a bit below 100 MH/s, but it drops down to around 60 MH/s and not below that like with stock settings. So, performance wise mining Ethereum (if there was no artificial hashrate limiter) the RTX 3080 Ti should’ve been normally capable of delivering the same hashrate as an RTX 3090 does currently. Something around 100 MH/s with stock settings and about 120 MH/s with clocked memory and reduced power usage could’ve been possible, but instead we are getting just around half of that in reality.

Now, Nvidia is talking about Ethereum mining hashrate limiter, though some other memory intensive crypto mining algorithms might also be affected as we already know, but there are still other algorithms that will be delivering the full hashrate without any artificial limiters in play. Here is an example with RavenCoin (RVN) mining on the RTX 3080 Ti where the hashrate is not being artificially reduced, you will be getting about 48 MH/s hashrate for KawPoW with the stock settings. And although this will make mining RVN more profitable than ETH on this particular GPU, if the artificial ETH hashrate limiter was not present mining ETH would’ve been more profitable. So, the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is not going to be an attractive option for Ethereum miners, though some other crypto miners not into ETH might be interested, but we are seeing starting prices for the Ti as for the non-Ti version where available. And unlike miners, gamers will not be very happy to buy at these inflated prices, do not forget however that gamers will be getting performance very close to that of the much higher priced (for the moment) RTX 3090 GPUs.

The New Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti that should also be hitting the market in a few days from now is also going to offer a nice upgrade in terms of hardware specs over the older RTX 3070 GPU, but just like the RTX 3080 Ti it will also come with artificial Ethereum hashrate limiter. The most notable upgrade for the new RTX3 070 Ti over the old non-Ti model is the new faster GDDR6X memory which should in theory increase the mining performance for memory intensive algorithm, but due to the Nvidia hashrate limiter Ethereum mining will not be benefiting much and in fact we expect to see lower hashrate than on RTX 3070 thanks to the limiter in play. Again, some other memory intensive algorithms besides Ethash might be affected as well, though not all, and GPU intensive mining will probably not suffer and the performance there should be slightly better than on RTX 3070.