Nvidia’s plan to expand its Ethereum mining limiter to more RTX 3000 graphics cards has an ironic caveat—the limiter won’t arrive on Nvidia’s own Founders Edition GPUs.
The company also said it’ll be up to graphics card vendors on how they transition to using the Ethereum mining limiter. So its rollout may arrive with a trickle, rather than an immediate flood, assuming you can even buy a card.
Nvidia’s goal is to begin shipping the first RTX 3060 Ti, 3070, and 3080 cards with the Ethereum mining limiter late this month. The boxes and online listings for these products will be labeled with “Lite Hash Rate,” or LHR, to signify that their mining capabilities are restricted.
However, PCGamer reports that Nvidia won’t bring the mining limiter to the Founders Edition cards, which continue to restock about every two weeks on Best Buy.
“Founders Edition is a limited production graphics card sold at MSRP (Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price), and at this point we don’t have plans to make versions with LHR,” Nvidia told us in an email. How long Nvidia plans to keep manufacturing these cards was left unsaid.
On whether Nvidia’s partners will automatically incorporate the limiter, the company added: “It will be a transition. Each AIC (board partner) is responsible for how the transition will work within their graphics card lineup, however.”
Nvidia also addressed why it decided to cap—rather than fully eliminate—the Ethereum mining capability to 50% on the applicable RTX 3000 cards. “We believe 50% is the right balance to dissuade professional miners, and still give gamers the opportunity to mine,” it said.
We’ve reached out to the various GPU vendors about whether they plan to fully transition to the mining limiter, and will update the story if we hear back. However, the days of Ethereum mining already appear to be on the way out. The foundation behind the cryptocurrency plans on phasing out the need for GPU-intensive mining in the coming months.
The impending change is raising hopes it'll become easier to buy an RTX graphics card. Nevertheless, it’s possible the mining community will simply keep buying GPUs to mine a different virtual currency.