Nvidia LHR Lock Officially Cracked Bringing Full Crypto Mining Speeds

Popular mining software company NiceHash has today released the first software that can fully unlock Nvidia’s light hashrate (LHR) mining limiter on specific graphics cards, unleashing their full speed when mining crypto coin Ethereum.

There have been several false starts with the mining community’s efforts to break Nvidia’s light hashrate (LHR) mining limiter, but it seems NiceHash is the first mining software company to fully unlock mining performance on LHR cards. Previous efforts have only partially unlocked the performance, which was introduced on all new cards except the RTX 3090 in an effort to make more cards available to gamers, with some software claiming to do so even turning out to be malware.

NiceHash, though, is a respected and long-standing mining software company and its announcement today includes data claiming to allow the RTX 3080 Ti – a card that was LHR-locked from the start – to mine at 120MH/s as opposed to 80MH/sec with some newer partial unlock software or lower than 70MH/sec without it. The RTX 3070 Ti and LHR versions of the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3060 are also listed as seeing big increases when using Nicehash.

At the moment, only NiceHash Quickminer supports the company’s secretive unlock, but several high-profile miners such as YouTube’s Son of a Tech have posted videos showing the software living up to its claims.

The news comes as a blow to gamers who have seen lower prices for graphics cards in recent weeks as crypto prices fell and graphics card supplies improved with many even retailing for MSRP. However, with a downturn in markets and the price of most crypto currencies, as well as increasing utility bills, the impact of the news is certainly smaller than it would have been six months ago.

It’s far from a simple situation, but in the short term, we can probably expect the price of LHR cards to rise again assuming miners turn to them instead of more expensive non-LHR models.