Simple BIOS Update Is Boosting Mining Performance on Some LHR Nvidia Cards

The crypto-mining limitations of some RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards may have just been bypassed with a firmware update.

In at least three cases, cryptocurrency miners were able to update the vBIOS on their RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards and see a substantial jump in the hashrate of their cards, OwnSnap reports.

Reddit user bravo_char1 discovered this upgrade by updating an EVGA RTX 3080 Ti XC3 with firmware released by EVGA that removes a power limit activated when memory loads are high, Tom’s Hardware reports. Bravo_char1 achieved a 21% bump in mining performance, going from 66MH/s (megahashes per second) before the BIOS update to 80MH/s afterward.

Two other miners went through a similar process and saw their cards reach even higher hash rates, according to OwnSnap. One miner hit a 90MH/s rate. In another case, YouTuber Red Panda Mining actually flashed the EVGA BIOS to a non-EVGA Inno3D 3080 Ti iChill X3, raising its hashrate from 74MH/s to that 91MH/s mark. 

As many Nvidia graphics cards are coming with Nvidia’s “Lite Hash Rate” (LHR) built in, workarounds give miners a way to restore some of their cards’ potential. This is not the first case of miners getting around the LHR on Nvidia cards either, as mining software released earlier this year loosened the hash rate limit as well.

This fix won’t necessarily make LHR cards a great choice for miners, though. Unless other card makers release their own firmware updates, miners risk bricking their graphics cards if they try to use EVGA’s firmware on non-EVGA cards. The LHR cards also aren’t quite catching up to their fully unrestricted counterparts. As Tom’s Hardware reports, the cheaper and less powerful RTX 3080 is capable of a superior 94MH/s.