NVidia LHR Cards Explained

If you are a miner or a gamer you'd have heard about the new LHR (Lite Hash Rate) graphics cards NVidia is releasing. Read Their Blog Article, which states all newly manufactured (late May 2021) RTX 3060, 3060 Ti, 3070, 3070 Ti, 3080 & 3080 Ti cards will feature a reduced Ethereum hash rate. There are still some (August 2021) full hash rate cards floating around for sale, but they are increasingly difficult to get hold of especially in large quantities. Basically NVidia is taking a stand to appear to protect its core and original market, gamers. The reason I say 'appear' is because I believe NVidia wants to force miners to start using their CMP HX series cards, which are cheaper to make, but more expensive to buy. That's right, at the end of the day I believe this is about NVidia's bottom line.

The LHR cards have spooked some miners but for most miners it is just bringing the timeline forward for Ethereum mining to cease. Some time at the end of this year or the start of next the Ethereum Beacon PoS chain will merge with the current Ethereum PoW chain. After the merge there will be no more Ethereum mining on the main Ethereum chain. Perhaps some will try to maintain a copy of the old chain fork, but I'm not sure that will be popular or lucrative. Everyone will be moving to the new chain and you'll just have a bunch of grumpy miners fighting for transaction scraps on a defunct, old, obsolete blockchain. So at some point in the near future Ethereum mining will naturally stop. At this point everyone will be mining something else. Ergo, Ravencoin, Ethereum Classic, Conflux or some other coin which rises to the top of the profitability chart. With the exception of Ethereum Classic, which is affected by LHR and Ergo, which is moderately affected by LHR, the NVidia LHR cards will be as good as the full hash rate cards for other algorithms. Perhaps NVidia will keep pace with whatever algorithm is most popular and add this to the LHR block list, but this would be a constant battle with miners who actively work to circumvent these measures. One piece of mining software, NBMiner, already claims to have partially bypassed the Ethereum LHR limitation - Read Here).

So most miners are currently buying RTX 3000 LHR series cards that they know have a built in limitation for ETH, and mining RVN instead without any drop in profitability compared with the non-LHR brethren! Will this still be profitable after the Ethereum merge, who knows, let's wait and see. All I do know is that there is a lot of hash power that will be leaving the Ethereum block chain and trying to squeeze onto another block chain. It will be a wild ride, but I think it will settle down into a happy equilibrium after a short while.

In Summary : You can mine at almost the same profitability with an LHR card, by choosing a different coin

Next : AMD's New Dual RX580 Mining Card