Mistake Enables Full GeForce RTX 3060 ETH Mining – Over 50 MH/s

By Nathan Kirsch

NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3060 launched to much fanfare as they were able to decrease cryptocurrency mining performance. At $329 MSRP it was supposed to be a card for gamers that Ethereum miners wouldn’t buy by the truck load. NVIDIA even touted that this was “not just a driver thing” to the tech press. The hash rate limiter required a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 Silicon and the vBIOS.

Sadly, we can confirm the hash rate limiter on the NVIDIA Geforce RTX 3060 has been broken. It wasn’t hacked by a foreign criminal organization or some 8-year old in the basement of their family home. Microsoft simply released GeForce 470.05 drivers in the Windows 10 Insider ring. This beta driver can be installed on any system and does away with NVIDIA’s anti-mining work.

MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Gaming X Trio Video Card

We’ve been able to confirm this ourselves today on our video card test system.

ETH Ethereum Mining on GeForce RTX 3060 Before

Our test system had NVIDIA 461.72 drivers installed already and we fired up T-Rex v0.19.12 and did some baseline ETH mining. We were getting just under 22 MH/s with the stock settings on our MSI GeForce RTX 3060 TRIO X Gaming card.

ETH Ethereum Mining on GeForce RTX 3060 After

After updating the system to NVIDIA 470.05 drivers we ran the miner again and we were getting just under 42 MH/s. Nothing was required other than changing the driver.

You can download this driver on the NVIDIA developer page here (membership required).

ETH Ethereum Mining on GeForce RTX 3060 - Overclocked Memory +1000MHz

Overclocking the memory to +1000 MHz with MSI Afterburner and lowering the power limit to 88% we managed to hit just shy of 48 MH/s.

Getting Over 50 MH/s on the GeForce RTX 3060

ETH Ethereum Mining on GeForce RTX 3060 - Overclocked Memory +1450MHz

Reaching over 50 MH/s is possible if your card is a decent overclocker. With the memory set to +1450 MHz and the GPU power limit set to 88% we managed to reach 50.2 MH/s. The mining application showed that the GPU was using under 150 Watts of power and the GPU temperature was 55C. Our card could be overclocked up to +1550 MHz before stability became an issue on the Samsung GDDR6 memory modules.

At 50 MH/s you are looking at about $5.70 in mining revenue per day from Ethereum (ETH) with a profit of around $5.35 after electric. That means it would take about 62 days to recoup the cost of the GeForce RTX 3060 if you mine 24/7.

Many expected the GeForce RTX 3060 mining preventions would be worked around and they were right. The NVIDIA mining limiter is gone and so are the GeForce RTX 3060 cards.