NVIDIA confirms the ETH limiter on RTX 3060 was removed accidentally
A day after the news broke that RTX 3060 mining limiter has been removed, the company responsible for this situation has released a short statement. This company is NVIDIA.
After initial reports that the Ethereum hash rate limiter on GeForce RTX 3060 mid-range *gaming* graphics card has been bypassed, NVIDIA has finally confirmed that the driver responsible for this situation was released inadvertently. NVIDIA has since removed the driver, but the damage has already been done.
It was discovered that GeForce 470.05 driver that was released only to software developers who are enrolled in the NVIDIA program, actually removed the hash rate limiter that NVIDIA was eager to announce as a cure for the GPU mining craze. This software was never publically available, but miners and enthusiasts were quick to notice that the mining limiter does not work with this particular driver. NVIDIA today confirmed that this was an internal development driver that had hash rate limiter disabled in some configurations:
A developer driver inadvertently included code used for internal development which removes the hash rate limiter on RTX 3060 in some configurations.
The driver has been removed.
— NVIDIA
As noted in the statement, the driver does not work for all graphics cards. It also does not work for graphics cards that do not have a display connector attached to a monitor or if the graphics card is used with a riser. Multiple-GPU configurations are possible but only when cards are inserted into the motherboard slots and have dummy monitor plugs.
According to people familiar with the matter, the driver works for ASUS, Palit, EVGA, GALAX, Gigabyte, and MSI cards. Some people encounter problems with ZOTAC and Inno3D graphics cards though.
Source: Andreas Schilling (HardwareLuxx)
