In this article, we will talk about the experiments carried out by the team of the mining pool 2Miners and the principles of dual mining mode in the process of unlocking the LHR using the example of the work of the popular T-Rex miner.
The miner was tested with GeForce RTX 3080 Ti video cards, but the principles are applicable to any LHR video card.
The history of lowering the hash rate in mining on NVIDIA video cards dates back to February 2021. It was then that the company posted an article on its blog titled «GeForce Is Made for Gaming, CMP Is Made to Mine.»
The history of the appearance of LHR-video cards
In this article, NVIDIA announced the Halving Hash Rate for GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards. For the full article, visit the NVIDIA website.
In May 2021, the NVIDIA Blog publishes an article titled «A Further Step to Getting GeForce Cards into the Hands of Gamers»: «Another Step to Making GeForce Cards Available to Gamers.» The full text of the material can be found here.
The article deals with reducing the hash rate on the Ethash algorithm for the recently produced GeForce RTX 3080, 3070 and 3060 Ti video cards. These cards go on sale from the end of May 2021 and are marked with the identifier «Lite Hash Rate» or «LHR».
At the end of May 2021, NVIDIA announced the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and GeForce RTX 3070 Ti video cards. The news about this is posted here.
And although the presence of «LHR» in these video cards was not officially announced, according to unofficial information that appeared on the Internet even before the announcement, they also had a reduced hash rate on the Ethash algorithm, which was confirmed after the video cards went on sale and were tested.
It was from May 2021 that an active discussion of the term «LHR» began in the professional environment.
Description of the test bench. Assessing the Potential Potential Hashrate and Impact of LHR
Test bench composition:
- Motherboard: BIOSTAR Hi-Fi B85S2
- CPU: Intel Pentium G3220
- Memory: DDR3 SDRAM Kingston 4Gb
- HDD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 160Gb
- PSU: EVGA 1000 GQ 80+ GOLD 1000W
- GPU: EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 ULTRA GAMING (1800 MHz Boost Clock, Memory Clock 19000 MHz (effective), TPD: 350 Watts)
- Two video cards are connected to the motherboard, each via a PCI-E X16-X1 riser.
- OS: Windows 10
- Nvidia drivers: 471.68
- Overclocking: MSI Afterburner 4.6.4 Beta 3
- Monitoring: GPU-Z
Testing was carried out in a room with an ambient temperature of + 15 ° C.
The estimation of the potential hash rate for the RTX 3080 Ti on the Ethash and Etchash algorithms is described in detail in the article “How to increase the hash rate in mining. Method for unlocking LHR-video cards with GMiner ”.
Potentially possible without blocking LHR speed on Ethash and Etchash algorithms is ≈116Mh / s, and blocking reduces the hash rate to ≈64Mh / s or ≈45%.
T-Rex miner testing
T-Rex is a universal GPU miner for cryptocurrency mining. The first version of the T-Rex miner was released in June 2018 and is actively developing and supporting popular algorithms such as Ethash, Kawpow, Octopus, Autolykos2, MTP, Firopow and Progpow. The miner is focused on the NVIDIA platform.
When using the «Dual mining LHR unlock» ETH + RVN mode, we achieved acceptable stability at high speed. The profitability estimate we obtained for this mode allows us to say that under certain conditions dual mining can be more profitable than mining in the standard mode.
For a statistically correct result, we recommend a long testing interval: each card must send more than 5000 shares to the pool.
Please note that we did not test on the most extreme graphics card settings. Your samples can possibly be stable in all Dual mining LHR unlock modes. Overclock and test each video card individually.
