Guest post by The Ampere graphics card was also supposed to be less attractive to miners, but it appears that the chipmaker shot itself in the foot and inadvertently posted a driver that unlocks mining performance on the RTX 3060. Meaning, anyone can unlock full mining performance with a minimum of effort.
Well that was short-lived.
I had previously heard that chinese hackers had already bypassed the restrictions…
https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-cryptocurrency-mining-hash-rate-limit-bypassed-hacked-rtx-3060-ethereum/
I’m am unclear if this is a second successful attack against the nvidia mining restrictions or if these are both one and the same?
Anyways…
Contrary to the PR statements, I’m quite confident that nvidia’s engineers knew it would only be a matter of time before the drivers would get hacked. As Thom already put it, well that was short-lived.
And guess who profit first-hand from this “hack” ? Nvidia for selling more cards. Bet the “anti-hack” won’t last long with another “inadvertently posted driver” or a hint on reddit.
Kochise,
Well, given that there’s 100% demand for every single GPU they get out the door, I don’t think that adding OR removing mining restrictions will have any impact on their sales of gaming GPUs. It seems the real motivation for the restrictions is just to placate users who want to see nvidia doing something about the stock shortages. I’ve actually read that the CMP “mining GPUs” are lower spec cards at a higher price than the 3060, so if anything nvidia really does prefer miners buy those instead. However the 30HX, 40HX, and 50HX all have a slower official hashing performance than an unrestricted 3060, so it makes absolutely no sense for a miner to buy a CMP card. Doubly so because the resell value of mining cards to gamers is gone.
https://wccftech.com/nvidia-cmp-30hx-cryptocurrency-mining-graphics-card-pictured-gigabytes-windforce-cooling/
Youtube is full of videos showing crypto miners like this one who bought up tons of stock at the MSRP prices. People hate it because when these miners buy so many cards for themselves, they’re willfully depriving others 🙁
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zADbew6szG4
It sucks, but the world is just going to have to wait it out until the world builds out more fabs, which could take years, hopefully crypto prices will drop before then. Beyond the shortages, crypto is creating it’s own environmental crisis, what a waste of resources.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/currencies/news/bitcoin-energy-consumption-cambridge-study-cryptocurrencies-bitcoin-mining-climate-change-2021-3-1030180485?op=1
I know many people buy into crypto ideals, but it reminds be of the tragedy of the commons.
Yeah, Nvidia is unloading video cards with manufacturing defects in the video parts as CMP cards. The CMP cards are video card rejects.
Could the difference be down to electrical usage? The lower spec cards use less juice, so people can get more density?
Excellent. That means some good deals later. Assuming the CMP cards can be used for general GPU compute.
Flatland_Spider,
I haven’t found good documentation about those. Officially speaking, do they only support specific ethorium mining applications? What about other cuda applications in general that don’t need graphics?
I assume these are normal cards from the same fabs that binned poorly.
LTT video tested something very similar back in 2019, turning the “mining cards” back into their logical GTX 1060 equivalents:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4
The cards are probably more energy efficient at lower speeds (ie lower MH/s, but higher MH/watt). The larger crypto farms are spending millions on electricity every month. It’s conceivable that they downclock the GPUs they have to optimize profits. I don’t know where the breakdown is. If someone’s electricity isn’t metered, then MH/s may be all that matters to them regardless of MH/watt.
@Alfman
That is the question.
I haven’t looked into them. 🙂 I’ve been waiting for a hardware site to get a hold of one. I would assume they would work the same way for CUDA as a regular video card does since they’re failed video cards, but Nvidia probably takes a different view.
Yeah, that’s all the CMP cards are. Nvidia admitted as much in their press release. XD Nvidia couldn’t sell them as video cards, so they’re shoveling them out as CMP cards.
So the 12 year olds with rich parents on Reddit? 🙂
That sounds like people who don’t really understand real world problems, and they’re just bench racing cards. In the real world there are power budgets and density matters. It’s why ASICs took over bitcoin mining.
Flatland_Spider,
I wonder how many people are crypto mining at school in the dorms? Not all apartments have individual meters either.
A quick search on youtube actually found tons of results. Here’s a news report suggesting it’s quite common. These guys are mining on somebody else’s dime and they seem proud of it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymbtW8kxw1c
Some schools ban it apparently, but by using a VPN, it can’t be tracked back to their school internet service. I imagine every room has 15A breaker for electrical sockets.
To get an idea of what the numbers look like, this guy is consuming 910watts at the wall for his 3X3090 rig. That’s about $16/day for ethorium at today’s rates.
https://coincryptonews.com/2021/01/17/3-x-nvidia-rtx-3090-mining-rig-build-310-mh-s-at-910-watts/
4 or 5 3090 GPUs might be viable on a 15A circuit.
The ASICs tend to be more efficient and more profitable. This one makes about $80/day.
https://www.asicminervalue.com/miners/innosilicon/a10-pro-eth-750mh
Thinking outside the box, a student might be able to siphon even more unmetered electricity from the lighting circuit, which might be fed by yet another 15A breaker.
Of course none of this is fair to the other students who end up paying higher fees to attend university, but there’s probably a lot of students who consider it a victimless activity.
@Alfman
A 910 Watt rig will use ~22KW/h/day. That’s is worth about $2. It is around 8.3A at 110V.
Brisvegas,
I’m not sure what your point is?
Using the average price I found here, the number I get is slightly higher than that.
https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
0.910 X 24 X 0.1319 = $2.88/day or about $1051/year.
Obviously some places pay less while other places pay more. The price in NY (where I went to university) is 39% higher than the national average, but I’ll just stick with the average.
Looking at average costs for room & board…
https://www.edmit.me/blog/how-much-will-room-board-cost-where-i-live
The average for a public school was $9,901/yr.
So the costs for this one rig would represent about 10.6% of housing costs. However keep in mind half of room & board actually pays for food and this would represent a bigger percentage of the dormitory housing costs. And it would likely be a huge proportion of the student’s energy bill, if it could be itemized as such.
Also, there are costs beyond the electric bill, if too many students were to do this, it could actually require the university to spend money on electrical infrastructure upgrades. They’re really in a tough spot here because there’s not much that they can do about it. Adding meters to individual rooms would cost a small fortune. The harsh reality is that everyone will have to pay higher prices to subsidize mining, or cutting student services elsewhere. Either way it kind of sucks IMHO.
Am I missing something? What was stopping anyone from using previous versions of the driver before the hack was introduced?
javiercero1,
RTX 3060 was introduced after Nvidia stated that it would be doing this, so it’s very likely that none of the previous drivers are compatible with this card (TBH, given that it’s the same ampere architecture, it’s very likely any technical incompatibility is only superficial in nature).
Nvidia’s plans did not include restricting any of the already released 3000 cards, RTX 3070 and up.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidias-cryptocurrency-mining-restriction-wont-be-coming-to-other-rtx-cards
These higher cards outperform the 3060 and continue to be in high demand by both gamers and crypto miners.