Miners Successfully Hack Through Mining Restrictions For NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

Back before the launch of the GeForce RTX 3060, NVIDIA announced its CMP, a GPU lineup specifically dedicated to mining crytocurrency. Additionally, it also announced that it would be limiting the hashrate of the RTX 3060, in hope that it would deter GPU miners from scalping or hoarding the GPU.

As the saying goes, life isn’t fair, and unsurprisingly, the so-called “mining restriction” that was put in place by NVIDIA has reportedly been broken by the very same miners. Japan-based tech site, PC Watch, confirmed that NVIDIA’s restrictions had already been “circumvented” via interaction with related parties.

The specific method isn’t mentioned by PC Watch, but the site states that bypassing the RTX 3060 restrictions does not require any modification to the card’s driver of BIOS, and a “little effort” is all it takes to get it to mine.

It also appears that the hack isn’t restricted to just one type of mining software. A group of developers by the name of Phoenix Miners, posted a reply on GitHub that it was working on a big update revolving around NVIDIA kernels. Another report points at a particular NVIDIA WSL driver – namely, a 470.05 Beta driver – that will, in fact, remove NVIDIA’s restrictions for Ethereum mining on the RTX 3060. However, it should be noted that this claim still remains unconfirmed.

As for the RTX 3060’s mining performance with the restrictions lifted, there are some videos of the card achieving hashrates beyond 40MH/s while mining for Ethereum and is even capable of sustaining those rates, even after nearly an hour of use.