A mysterious developer claims he created a program to remove the cryptocurrency mining limitation on Nvidia’s RTX 3000 graphics cards. But others are warning it may be a scam.
Last week, a Poland-based developer called “Sergey” introduced a tool that promises to lift Nvidia’s Lite Hash Rate limiter. “After a few months of work, I start publishing the results. LHR v2 has finally been beaten!” Sergey boasted in his Telegram channel.
Nvidia originally created the LHR limiter a year ago to discourage miners from buying its gaming graphics cards, which have been in short supply. The LHR limiter is supposed to cap the Ethereum mining capabilities on the GPUs to 50%. But since then, the mining community has come up with ways to partially bypass the limiter and raise the mining rate to 70%.
Sergey now claims he can raise the mining rate to nearly 100%. As proof, he posted screenshots that say his program unlocked the Ethereum mining on several RTX 3000 graphics cards.
In addition, Sergey plans on releasing the program, dubbed LHR Unlocker, for free as a public beta on Saturday through a GitHub page.
However, many in the cryptocurrency mining community already suspect the program may be malicious in nature. One red flag is that the Telegram channel and GitHub page for Sergey only appeared four days ago when he began promoting the LHR Unlocker tool.
Sergey also promoted his software tool on YouTube. However, he did so by using a computer-generated voice to narrate the video. The other problem is that downloading and executing a program from an unknown developer is a security risk; the same program could be malware capable of taking over a PC.
Sergey’s LHR Unlocker supposedly works by modifying the BIOS and other graphic driver files for the Nvidia GPUs. “They (the modified driver files) are downloaded and installed automatically in Windows when the program is installed,” he wrote on his GitHub page. “Due to the size, I placed the driver file on a private server.”
In response to the scam accusations, Sergey posted on GitHub: “I provide it for free, the use of this program is the decision of the user. I don't see a SCAM opportunity here. If you decide that it doesn't work for you, you don't need to use it.” On his Telegram channel, Sergey said he decided to make the software free to demonstrate his computer skills in the hopes it’ll open up new professional opportunities. (He's also started asking for donations in cryptocurrency.)
Still, we recommend users avoid downloading the tool until it’s been vetted. If real, though, then the software tool means cryptocurrency miners will have even more reason to buy LHR Nvidia RTX 3000 cards, although many have been doing so anyway.