NBMiner Partially Bypasses NVIDIA’s Ethermining Hash Rate Limiter, Increasing Mining Performance by Nearly 70%

A new update to the popular NBMiner appears to have partially bypassed the hash rate limit on Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 30 LHR series. In the changelog, the developer reports that miners (I mean users) can leverage up to 70% of the maximum hash rate on their LHR graphics cards. All the newer shipments of the RTX 30-series (Ampere) graphics cards, except the RTX 3090 now come with a miner block.

NVIDIA has done this to allow make sure that the GPUs go into the hands of gamers, rather than miners to make sure there isn’t a repeat of the 2019 crypto-hangover where the company’s gaming revenue plummeted due to a flood of second-hand (miner) graphics cards in the market. Furthermore, this pushes miners towards the newly introduced CMP lineup, rather than the GeForce products which can be recycled in case of a crypto-crash.

At the moment, the LHR graphics cards can only miner Ether with half the previously available hash rate, but with the new update, you can override the limit. The NBMiner update doesn’t exactly unlock the Ether hash rate. Instead, it provides an adjustable percentage that the application tries to get. The developer suggests setting this value to 68% as that is known to be stable on tested hardware. 

• New LHR mode for ETH mining on RTX 30 series LHR GPUs, supports Windows & Linux, able to get ~70% of maximum unlocked hashrate.
  • This mode can be tuned by argument -lhr, only works for ethash right now.
  • -lhr default to 0, meaning even if -lhr is not set, LHR mode with -lhr 68 will be applied to LHR GPUs if certain GPUs are detected.
  • Tune LHR mode by setting -lhr <value>, a specific value will tell miner try to reach value percent of maximum unlocker hashrate, e.g. -lhr 68 will expect to get 68% of hashrate for same model non-LHR GPU.
  • Higher -lhr value will results in higher hashrate, but has higher possibility to run into lock state, which will leads to much less hashrate.
  • A good start tuning value is 68, which has been tested to be stable on most rig configurations.
  • -lhr value can be set for each GPU by using comma separeted list, -lhr 65,68,0,-1, where -1 means turn off LHR mode.

Source: NBMiner