Nvidia Mining Driver v470.05: How to remove hashrate limitation RTX 3060?

Finally it looks like a workaround has been found to an artificially forced hashrate limiter for Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPUs mining Ethereum, and it appears to be quite simple. You just need to use the developer driver version 470.05, which doesn’t seem to have a hashrate limitation applied, unlike the regular GeForce video driver you usually load for these graphics cards. This has been reported by some users and we can confirm that it does work and you can get the full mining hashrate for Ethereum using this driver, however there is still a catch … read below for the latest updates on what and how it works.

We get an Ethash mining hashrate of 47 MH / s using the Nvidia developer driver version 470.05 with PhoenixMiner for Ethereum mining with the following settings in MSI Afterburner: 70% TDP, -500 MHz GPU, +1000 MHz VRAM. You can check with what performance the Asus ROG Strix GeForce RTX 3060 OC Edition can provide you with regular drivers with a limited hash rate, although the limitation does not apply to all cryptoalgorithms, but, for example, to resource-intensive memory algorithms such as Ethash and VertHash. …

The downside is that the Nvidia developer driver version 470.05 requires you to register with the Nvidia website as a developer, and it is still only available for Windows at the moment. But it works and you get the full hashrate of Ethereum mining and other algorithms like Verthash. used by Vertcoin, which apparently also suffered from the hashrate limitation imposed by Nvidia for the RTX 3060. For VTC mining with the above settings, the hashrate we get is around 810 KH / s instead of halving below 400 with the regular driver Update: it looks like that this “workaround” is still somewhat limited only when using one RTX 3060 GPU connected to the monitor, with a lot of GPUs in the mining rig it doesn’t seem to work at full hash rate on all GPUs …

Further investigation of this issue with a single RTX 3060 GPU running at unlimited hash rates while a few of them didn’t work showed that some conditions seemed to have been met. One RTX 3060 GPU connected to a PCI-E 8 / x16 slot (no extenders) and a monitor connected to it. This leads us to believe that Nvidia actually did not forget to implement protection in the latest version of the developer driver 370.05, but instead improved its protection mechanism further. What they could do is detect that you are using a single graphics card in a gaming setup, and then no limits, even for mining, will apply, while if there are more GPUs present on a slower PCI-E interface, then this is mining rig and hashrate will be reduced.

Official link to the driver, developer access is required to download: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda/wsl/download