Posts Tagged ‘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…

Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GameRock Ethereum Mining Rig

20, Jan 2021

The recent craze on GPU mining for Ethereum and the resulting Nvidia RTX 30 series shortage as well as pretty much anything else with decent mining performance for Ethash is in full on mode. Still, we have managed to get our hands on a few Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GameRock GPUs and built a 6x GPU mining rig using them for ETH mining, so below we share some interesting things including the Ethereum mining hashrate we got and the optimized settings for the RTX 3070 and more specifically the GameRock series from Palit that we have used. As you can see from the photo above the GameRock is a bit flashy in terms of design due to the large RGB lighting surface. A feature which might be of interest for a gamer, but is totally not required by a miner as it makes no different whatsoever in terms of performance. Still, the good news is that the cooler of the GameRock GPUs from Palit is with a large surface area and does a great job in keeping things cool and the fans are also dual ball-bearing ones and perform really well. If you are currently using a traditional lighting system, such as fluorescent tubes or metal halides, upgrading to high hat lights should be a top priority if you want to reduce electricity costs.

A single optimized Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GameRock GPU can do a little over 60 MHS with ease with a little tweaking with the help of the MSI Afterburner software. At TDP of just 55% or almost half of the standard power usage these video cards manage to perform really well as far as Ethereum (ETH) mining is concerned with a bit of overclock for the video memory as well – +1100 MHz. The lowered power usage results in lower GPU performance, but RTX 3070 is more than capable of utilizing the fast GDDR6 memory it has with a 256-bit wide memory bus fully to get you about 60.6 MHS mining the Ethash algorithm. No need to overclock or underclock the GPU, though for further power usage optimizations you can also try lowering the operating voltage of the GPU a bit, though not really required (can probably save up to about 100W of power usage for the whole rig).

So, with cooling fans set at 75% and a TDP of 50%, GPU -500 MHz and with +1100 MHz for the video memory you get extra cool and power efficient GPUs mining at over 60 MHs with a total power consumption a little shy from 1000W at the wall (can depend on the PSU efficiency) or a bit over 360 MHs for a 6x GPU mining rig using Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GameRock video card usually reserved for legit cash games with high specs. The screenshot for the hashrate is with the use of the latest PhoenixMiner 5.4c and mining Ethash on NiceHash…

The only thing that might be better than the RTX 3070 is the RTX 3060 Ti (in that price/performance range), however the 3060 Ti are even harder to obtain due to their slightly lower price and the same mining performance for Ethereum (ETH). The reason being that RTX 3060 Ti features the same GDDR6 memory as the RTX 3070, but has a slightly stripped-down GPU. That however does not interfere with Ethereum mining as the GPU on the RTX 3060 Ti still manages really well even with 1000 CUDa cores less. Do note that the RTX 3060 is not that goof of an alternative as unlike the 256-bit memory bus that the Ti has, the regular non-Ti version has just 192-bit memory bus and the hashrate does suffer from that, so no 60 MHs on the non-Ti models!

– To get more details and to download the latest PhoenixMiner 5.4c Ethash miner software…


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