Last week, it was reported that NVIDIA’s Hash Rate limiter on the RTX 3060 has been bypassed by Chinese hackers. And now a new update from a Chinese news outlet says that the bypass does not require any driver or BIOS modifications and the process is actually very simple to perform on the graphics card.
NVIDIA recently introduced the Hash limiter in the RTX 3060 graphics card which halved the hash rate of the Ethereum crypto mining algorithm. But NVIDIA’s attempt to sway the crypto miners from buying the RTX 3060 seems to be short-lived as the hash limiter on the RTX 3060 as cryptocurrency miners based in China have found a way to by-pass it using a custom mod.
When NVIDIA introduced the hash limiter, they said that it is a hardware system that cannot be bypassed. The GeForce RTX 3060 was the first in the lineup to receive such treatment and the company stated that it will be hard to crack or even bypass based on how each aspect of the GPU was communicating with each other.
NVIDIA said the following about the Mining Hash Limiter.
The whole process occurs through a secure handshake between the GPU, Driver, and the BIOS (Firmware). All three prevent the removal of the hash limiter. Now NVIDIA is quite confident that this would be enough to tackle miners running GeForce GPUs but at the same time, we can’t be too sure about the overall effectiveness of this as VBIOS and driver mods could potentially allow miners to bypass the limit once again.
NVIDIA’s hash rate limiter works by determining whether a set of mining algorithms were being run on the GPU and immediately halved the mining rate. But Chinese crypto miners have found a way to bypass this limiter through a mod.
The Chinese mod will help miners unlock the full hash potential of the GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card. A picture spotted by I_Leak_VN shows the Geforce RTX 3060 crunching 45 MH/s in Ethereum using the Dagger Hashi-Motto algorithm. A total of 8 graphics cards were running in the system delivering a combined hash rate of 362.75 MH/s.
As a confirmation, the news outlet has posted a picture of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 mining Ethereum cryptocurrency using the Daggerhashimoto algorithm (T-REX) and delivering a total of around 50 MH/s. A single GPU was used which had an average power consumption of 110 Watt with fans set to 70% and the temperatures averaging around 33C (Degrees).
This is really bad news for gamers who planned to buy these cards for gaming purposes. The mod’s validity was also confirmed by a Vietnamese Facebook group. We will have to wait and see if NVIDIA can take some action against this and patch up this mod to stop the card mining at full potential.
