GPU mining developed into a big business. It forced gamers and miners to compete with each other for limited supply, therefore driving up the price. Nvidia deserves credit for developing its low hash rate cards (LHR) which has held up over time and it did help with supply. Curiously though, Nvidia’s mobile GPUs don’t come with hash rate limiters. With that in mind, a Chinese manufacturer has apparently taken RTX 3060 mobile GPUs and repurposed them into desktop cards aimed at miners.
News of the cards came via Tom’s Hardware and cnBeta where a Weibo user posted about the cards for sale on Gofish, which is a Chinese platform for selling second-hand items. It’s these cards that reportedly contain GeForce RTX 3060 Mobile GPU that bypass Nvidia's Ethereum anti-mining limiter.
We’ve written extensively about the impact of mining on GPU availability and pricing. Cards like the FHR desktop RTX 3060 don’t produce the highest hash rates, but they do well in hashes per watt, which is the true measure of whether a GPU is a good miner or not.
The problem for miners — and the benefit of gamers — is that currently available RTX 3060’s are all LHR versions. Some early 3060’s could be unlocked, but they are almost certainly not available anywhere anymore. Since the mobile 3060 uses the same GA106 GPU, but can mine at full performance, it really does make sense to use the 3060M chips in a desktop form factor. They’re better at mining, but don’t really do anything for gamers.
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The desktop and mobile RTX 3060’s both use the same GA106 GPU. The desktop 3060 card contains 3584 shaders and 12GB of memory, whereas the mobile version contains
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