The NiceHash mining software has released an update that unlocks 100% Ethereum hashrate on Nvidia’s LHR RTX graphics cards.
Ethereum Miners Can Now Completely Circumvent Nvidia’s LHR
The “Lite Hash Rate” (LHR) is an updated version of the RTX graphics cards series that comes preinstalled with a limiter on the mining power.
There was an industry wide silicon chip shortage last year that, combined with the unprecedented demand, made GPUs a very hard buy.
Nvidia released this line of cards to discourage Ethereum miners from buying up the cards as gamers, the company’s main customers for the GPUs, weren’t able to buy any.
With the limiter, the hashrate of the RTX 30 series was reduced by 50%. The “hashrate” here refers to a measure of the total ETH mining power of the card.
Higher is the value of this metric, faster can the card crunch out the numbers, and so naturally higher is the profit for the miner.
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Only a few months after Nvidia dropped these cards, workarounds in the ETH mining community already started to appear.
The solutions ranged from outright unlocking more of the hashrate, to using the available power for mining ETH and using the locked portion for mining any other coin simultaneously.
None of these workarounds, however, let miners use 100% of the hashrate on their RTX GPUs for mining Ethereum.
Now, “NiceHash” has announced in a blogpost that the mining software has become the first to fully unlock the LHR cards.
“Now you can earn more profits than any other mining software on the market if you are using LHR graphics cards with NiceHash QuickMiner,” said the developer.
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Ultimately, Nvidia’s LHR could do little to stop miners from using their cards for mining Ethereum and other cryptos.
Even before any workarounds were available to the public, ETH mining was still quite profitable as the bull run last year meant that the mining rewards were worth a lot in USD.
ETH Price
At the time of writing, Ethereum’s price floats around $2.4k, down 13% in the last seven days. Over the past month, the crypto has lost 23% in value.
The below chart shows the trend in the price of the coin over the last five days.
The price of the crypto seems to have plunged down over the last few days | Source: ETHUSD on TradingView
Ethereum as well as the wider cryptocurrency market, including Bitcoin, have crashed down over the past few days.
At the moment, it’s unclear whether a bottom has been hit or if the price will continue to slide further in the near future.
Featured image from Pixabay.com, chart from TradingView.com