Following the accidental release of a CUDA driver that effectively makes its current anti-mining measures useless, NVIDIA is reportedly launching a new version of the GeForce RTX 3060 that will feature a revised and more aggressive mechanism for limiting the GPU’s ability to mine the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain, Ether (ETH). The news comes from Hong Kong hardware site HKEPC, which reported that the updated GeForce RTX 3060 will leverage a new GA106 GPU variant identified as the GA106-302 and be released some time in May. Notable leaker kopite7kimi has warned that NVIDIA plans to make similar revisions to the rest of its GeForce RTX 30 Series lineup.
I’ve said before, maybe not GA106 only.
— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) April 15, 2021
For example, we would meet GA102-302/202 and GA104-302/202. https://t.co/pGghHbikbV
NVIDIA pointed out that the GeForce RTX 3060 computing power limit is based on the handshake between the GPU, the driver and the VBIOS. When the user is detected to perform the Hash operation, it will force the GPU operation to slow down by 50%. Later, I believe that NVIDIA will be more rigorous in the distribution of drivers, and will never let the RTX 3060 self-breaking ETH restriction event repeat itself.
Sources: HKEPC, Igor’s Lab, VideoCardz, kopite7kimi