Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 ETH limiter bypassed by dumb dongle

by Mark Tyson on 22 March 2021, 11:11

Tags: NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qaeqd5

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About a week ago HEXUS reported upon the release of the Nvidia GeForce 470.05 driver which accidentally allowed owners of the RTX 3060 12GB to run the GPU at its full hash rate in ETH mining software. It was pretty quickly noticed that the crypto-mining limited bypass driver would only work its magic on a single RTX 3060 card in a system. This drew a nice line under the gaffe, as it seemed to allow owners of the GPU in everyday PCs to work and play on their PCs and earn some coin in their spare time.

Of course the above would not be the end of the story for attempts to bypass the RTX 3060 crypto perf nerf, but a full multi-GPU solution seems to have been confirmed very shortly after our report, as documented in Korean discussion forum Quasar Zone last week.

A forum user shared images and details of a surprisingly simple way to set up a 4-way RTX 3060 system for mining ETH. Using the Nvidia GeForce 470.05 driver, a quartet of RTX 3060 cards, and a cheap system based upon an Intel Pentium G3220 with 700W PSU the user fully enabled with 'mining rig' by popping an HDMI dummy plug into each discrete GPU. Setup and monitoring was done via iGPU HDMI output. Graphics cards from Galax, Inno3D and Palit have all been successfully tested by the Quasar Zone member.

This weekend HardwareLuxx Editor Andreas Schilling took a little time to test the HDMI dummy dongle method. He confirms it works fine, as you can see from the shared Tweet video, embedded below. I've noticed some Amazon sellers already advertising their HDMI Dummy dongles "for BTC miners" but they are still available for under £4 each.



HEXUS Forums :: 14 Comments

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That worked really well then… not
Not saying someone saw this coming, but some saw this coming. :)
DanceswithUnix
Looks like you also need a monitor plugged in (or a dummy hdmi monitor plug).
Apparently it also needs at least a 8x PCIe connection, limiting the motherboards you can use (some have a x4 connection on a secondary x16 slot which isn't going to cut it) and meaning you would need a full x16 to x16 riser to avoid the cards being packed together.

I still haven't heard of a Linux driver yet that does this, so that is probably the biggest hurdle for deployment on mining farms for now.
As has been said, this was kind of expected.

The title of this story is totally click bait though and isn't accurate - the dongle does not in any way bypass the ETH limiter - that is all handled by the driver. All the dongle does is let the card think it's connected to a monitor, so allows you to run multiple cards (using the existing driver based “bypass”) in one machine. You can't just get a retail RTX3060, plug in a HDMI dongle and “fix” your hashrates…..

The quality of Journalism on Hexus is normally good enough to not need the Daily Express style click bait headlines, surely!
Double up prices on yet another card incoming, it already happened with the 3090… I guess I will buy AMD from now on and eternity.