Nvidia RTX 3060 Hash Limiter Officially Bypassed By Chinese Hackers

Last week, we disputed the news that Nvidia RTX 3060’s hash limiter had been bypassed by Chinese hackers. But we did say that it would happen sooner or later and as it turns out, it happened sooner than any of us would have expected.

As per PC Watch Chinese hackers have finally broken through the new GPU’s hash limiter, that too without any driver or BIOS modifications. As you can see in the tweet below, the RTX 3060 is mining Ethereum at around 50 MH/s using the Daggerhashimoto algorithm (T-REX).

The method to circumvent the GPUs hash limiter is fairly simple: miners just need to use the GeForce 470.05 beta driver that NVIDIA distributed to developers through the Windows Insider Program. Installing the beta driver automatically unlocks the mining performance of the RTX 3060. (The driver is currently available for Windows only.)

Additionally, the GPU needs a dummy HDMI plug so that it registers that it’s plugged into a display. This is essential as the software on the GPU checks if it’s plugged into a display before it starts any operation. Miners might want to look into bringing a 16x PCIE riser into play as a 1X riser won’t really do the trick.

So, not only is the Nvidia RTX 3060 ‘unhackable’ no more, it’s the company’s own software that has rendered it so.

However, it is important to note that Nvidia put hash limiters in place to target mining rigs i.e. a group of GPUs working together. At the moment, only one RTX 3060 at a time has been hacked; if a group of them is operating together to mine cryptocurrency, the hash limiter might still be able to do its thing. Guess we’ll find out about that soon enough too but until then, watch this space.

About Nvidia

Nvidia Corporation is a multinational technology company incorporated in Delaware and based in Santa Clara, California.

Known for producing some of the best Graphical Processing Units (GPU) in the market, the company also provides parallel computing solutions to researchers and scientists worldwide. Not to mention, they also produce mobile computing chipsets in the form of Tegra Mobile Processors. The company was founded on April 5, 1993; almost 27 years ago, and competes with AMD (Mainly in GPUs), Intel, and Qualcomm (Processing Chipsets).