Posts Tagged ‘Nvidia 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…

Ethereum Mining on Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 Laptop GPUs

15, Feb 2021

Gaming laptops with the latest generation of mobile graphics cards from Nvidia in the form of their RTX 30 Series Laptop GPUs are popping on the market and apparently people are not only interested in playing games on them, but also using them for crypto mining. And similar to their desktop counterparts in the GeForce RTX 30 Series product line, the mobile versions of these graphics chips used in gaming laptops does manage to give you very good hashrates for mining Ethereum. The mobile GPU product line consists of the following models: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU for the moment. Although the names are like on the desktop variants of these video cards, the mobile ones have a clarifying “Laptop GPU” after the product name, because it is not the same specs graphics processor or even video memory as used on the desktop cards.

So, while the RTX 30 Series Laptop GPUs should still do pretty well for Ethereum mining and probably other crypto coins that use different algorithm than Ethash, you should not expect them to be as fast as their desktop versions. We have just tested mining Ethereum with RTX 3070 Laptop GPU on a Gaming Notebook using the MSI GS66 Stealth 10UG 15.6-inch gaming notebook and shared some interesting insight about the mobile RTX 30-series GPUs in it, but there is more to talk about in a separate article and we are doing it here.

On the image above you can see the specifications of a Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU and on the right form Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Desktop GPU. While these two are similar, they are not the same GPU specs wise and we are not talking about operating frequencies only. The Laptop GPU model has less CUDA Cores compared to the Desktop GPU and is also clocked much lower in terms of operating frequencies for both the graphics processor and for the memory. The video memory used is GDDR6 on both GPUs, but the mobile version has the memory running at lower frequency as compared to the desktop variant, just like the with the GPU. The more important thing here is that the memory bus is also the same 256-bit on both as memory-intensive crypto algorithms like Ethash do take advantage from a wider memory bus.

The lower operating frequencies are used in order to significantly reduce the power usage of the RTX 3070 Laptop GPU that uses between 80W and 95W in the gaming laptop we tested it on. Notebook manufacturers however have a wide range of GPU power usage to play with and thus operating frequencies from model to model may vary and performance can also be lower or higher. So, a larger 17-inch gaming laptop can allow for better cooling and thus the GPU can have a higher TGP rating and use more power than on a 15.6-inch model and that could result in a bit of extra performance boost.

What you should pay attention to here is that all of the RTX 30 series Laptop GPUs from Nvidia are using GDDR6 memory, there is no GDDR6X or a memory bus that is wider than 256-bit, even on the RTX 3080 Laptop GPU! There is also no RTX 3060 Ti mobile version, but a plain RTX 3060 Laptop GPU based on the upcoming RTX 3060 desktop counterparts at the end of this month. The RTX 3060 Laptop GPU comes with further reduced memory bus at just 192-bit, so that will mean lower Ethereum mining hashrate compared to the RTX 3070 Laptop GPU that uses the same GDDR6 memory, but comes with a 256-bit memory bus. The lower number of CUDA cores will not make a difference in terms of ETH mining hashrate, because the GPU has more than enough performance as far as Ethereum mining is concerned… even at the lowered clocks that the mobile GPUs have.

The biggest looser here is probably the RTX 3080 Laptop GPU that comes with GDDR6, instead of the GDDR6X video memory on the desktop version, and has just a 256-bit memory bus instead of the 320-bit for the desktop. This and with the lower clocks mean significantly reduced Ethereum hashrate and nowhere near what we’ve seen on the desktop RTX 3080 GPU that is probably the best in terms of price/performance (if you manage to get your hands on one at all) for ETH mining. With these specs the RTX 3080 Laptop GPU will perform more like what a desktop RTX 3070 GPU is capable of delivering as mining hashrate for Ethereum and not like what a “real” RTX 3080 video card does. With all that said, if you are going for a gaming laptop and plan on using it for crypto mining Ethereum (ETH) your best bet will most likely be the mid-range GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU, both in terms of price and in terms of performance.

How about the mining performance that each of the Nvidia GeForcve RTX 30 Series Laptop GPUs should be capable of delivering for Ethereum in terms of hashrate? Well, although things may vary a bit from laptop to laptop because of the variable power usage configured and the respective operating frequencies the numbers below should give you a good idea on what to expect from these Laptop GPUs as far as ETH mining is concerned. If used for GPU-intensive crypto algorithm, the mining performance will not be that much dependant on the video memory type, bus and frequency, but will also depend on the GPU’s number of CUDA cores and operating frequency as well and things may be different there. Here however the focus is Ethereum mining and the hashrate you get from these mobile graphics adapters found in the latest wave of gaming laptops that are just starting to become available on the market. We are using the latest PhoenixMiner AMD and Nvidia GPU mining software for our Ethereum performance tests and it has proven to work very well with the RTX Laptop GPUs as well as with their desktop counterparts in our experience.

GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU:
– Stock ETH hashrate: 34 MH/s
– Optimized ETH hashrate: 38 MH/s

GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU:
– Stock ETH hashrate: 45 MH/s
– Optimized ETH hashrate: 50 MH/s

GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU:
– Stock ETH hashrate: 49 MH/s
– Optimized ETH hashrate: 56 MH/s

The above hashrates are for GPUs in gaming notebooks with VRAM at 1500 MHz default for the RTX 3060 Laptop GPU and RTX 3070 Laptop GPU and 1750 MHz for the RTX 3080 Laptop GPU. The optimized hashrates are for overclocked video memory with +650 MHz in MSI Afterburner as this seems to be the sweet spot for mobile GPUs from the RTX 30 series, unlike +1100 MHz that seems to be the sweet spot for RTX 30 series desktop GPUs. the RTX 30 Series Laptop GPUs simply cannot seem to do as good as their desktop counterparts with +700 MHz or higher overclock, they just start to freeze, so the optimized mining hashrate is not that much higher with them as on the desktop versions.

Still, a good deal of extra performance with the same power consumption as it is already pretty well optimized for the laptop and you cannot easily try to change it other than maybe flashing a different video BIOS, though this is not something that we would recommend as it can cause you problems including with properly starting up the laptop. There are some people that report successfully flashing video BIOSes from other gaming laptops with higher power limit and higher clocks, but although that may be helpful for gaming purposes, it will most likely not give you advantage for mining Ethereum. What might be more beneficial is if you manage to successfully flash a video BIOS for the same GPU model, but with lower power limit. This may help you get better efficiency while still maintaining the same level of Ethereum mining performance and can also help keep things cooler and quieter. But then again this should be avoided as it may render your laptop unusable if it ends up not working as you expected it!

– More on Mining Ethereum with RTX 3070 Laptop GPU on a Gaming Notebook…


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