The second batch of the RTX 30 is also known as LHR or Low Hash Rate, due to the fact that its mining rate in Ethereum is cut in half. According to NVIDIA to safeguard the gamer market, the evil thinkers say that it is for its CMP HX range. The RTX LHR Unlocker could end this limitation. What is it and how it works?
When NVIDIA launched the first RTX 30 they were seen and not seen, their ability to mine cryptocurrencies made them a sweet tooth for mining farms that did not hesitate to pay huge amounts to take all the inventory to the anger of gamers on PCs that couldn’t renew their graphics card.
In order to satisfy everyone, the so-called RTX 30 LHR were born, basically a second shipment of the different graphics cards in the range with the BIOS and the GPU ID modified so that when mining Ethereum they gave half the performance with such as to reduce the interest of the farms for their mining RIGs. Well, an application has appeared that lifts this limitation.
What is RTX LHR Unlocker?
Well, it is an application whose task is to inject a custom GPU BIOS and firmware that completely remove the limitations of mining Ethereum in the RTX 30 LHR and therefore replaces those that come on the graphics card. According to the author of the application, a backup process of the one found on the card is carried out, but from here we cannot be sure since we have not tested it.
It must be taken into account that a change of this caliber of a GPU also implies altering its behavior, to the point where it is necessary to use a special driver to download from a private server.
From here we state that the use of a BIOS other than the one provided by NVIDIA can endanger the card and it is more than likely that we will lose the ability to use them for other purposes such as playing with them. So whoever replaces the BIOS using the RTX LHR Unlocker will have to be willing to sacrifice their graphics card to the mining task and forget about using it to play with it or other tasks.
What is the performance that we can obtain in mining?
To begin with, not all RTX 30 are compatible, for example, the models for laptops do not appear on the list and neither do the RTX 3090 or the RTX 3050. Although it is possible due to the fact that the first is very rare to see and the second has just recently been released. If you are interested in knowing the performance of each card when mining Ethereum, you have it in the image that accompanies these lines.
In any case, let’s not forget that the so-called Proof of Stake change is approaching, which will be a paradigm shift that will make graphics cards no longer the reference hardware for mining Ethereum. This will flood the market with second-hand non-LHR RTX 30 units that will no longer be of use to miners. Those that have been modified with the LHR Unlocker having lost gaming capabilities they will be a harder sell if the original graphics card firmware and BIOS have not been backed up and restored.
