Cryptocurrency Miners: Nvidia's Lite Hash Rate Limiter Did Little to Stop Us
Blake Teeter is a cryptocurrency miner based in Colorado, and a year ago Nvidia tried to stop people like him from buying the company’s graphics cards.
The result was the Nvidia Lite Hash Rate (LHR), a software limitation the company installed across most of the RTX 3000 GPU series to nerf their Ethereum mining capabilities. But if you thought the LHR series discouraged Teeter and his peers from buying them up, you’d be wrong. “I have approximately 20 LHR cards I mine with,” he tells us.
In total, Teeter’s mining rig spans about 95 GPUs. And lately, he’s been adding LHR Nvidia graphics cards to the mix because they can still rake in enough profits, despite their limitations. On average, his mining rig generates about $4,500 in Ethereum per month, after electricity costs.
“Yes, I feel LHR was pointless,” says Teeter, who began mining a year ago as a hobby. Return on investment with LHR "isn't a deal breaker for miners.”
Teeter's mining rig underscores how the cryptocurrency community can take precious GPU supplies away from gamers. In Teeter's case, he bought his graphics cards from various retailers, including Micro Center and Newegg's lottery system.
However, Nvidia's attempt to prevent the cryptocurrency craze from depleting GPU supplies seems to have flopped, according to miners in the community.
“This did not discourage miners at all,” says NiceHash, a cryptocurrency platform that helps PC owners lease their computing power for mining purposes.
A big reason why is because Nvidia’s LHR graphics cards only halved the Ethereum mining to 50%. In the months since, the mining community, including NiceHash itself, has come up with software programs that can raise the mining capability to over 70%.
As NiceHash points out,
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