Tuesday, May 18th 2021
NVIDIA Officially Announces RTX 30-series LHR Lineup
NVIDIA today has officially announced what we have gotten to know through sheer power of will, speculation, and leaks. The company took to a blog post to announce a new, revised lineup of RTX 30-series graphics cards, spanning from the RTX 3060 all the way to the premium RTX 3080 graphics card. All of these will now ship with a new silicon revision (the last 0 has been replaced with a 2, so we're now looking at GA102-202, GA04-302, etc.). LHR effectively halves each of these graphics cards' output in Ethereum mining, which is currently the greatest driver behind mining (and scalping) acquisition of graphics cards.
NVIDIA has also clarified that AIB partners will be clearly labeling their graphics cards with stickers denoting their "LHR" nature, both in the box and card itself, so that customers can know with utmost certainty what they are actually acquiring - though this only applies to newly-manufactured graphics cards, and not to the ones already in the retail channel, for obvious reasons. We are thus looking at a situation where we can find ourselves with two secondary markets for NVIDIA's RTX 30-series cards: one for miners, with non-LHR graphics cards and sold at much-inflated prices, and LHR-cards which should be in keeping with their MSRP - eventually. It remains to be seen whether or not we'll have to cope with yet another scalping arms race for the LHR cards as well, since there is surely a significant market still hungering for the 30-series performance.
Source:
NVIDIA Blog
NVIDIA has also clarified that AIB partners will be clearly labeling their graphics cards with stickers denoting their "LHR" nature, both in the box and card itself, so that customers can know with utmost certainty what they are actually acquiring - though this only applies to newly-manufactured graphics cards, and not to the ones already in the retail channel, for obvious reasons. We are thus looking at a situation where we can find ourselves with two secondary markets for NVIDIA's RTX 30-series cards: one for miners, with non-LHR graphics cards and sold at much-inflated prices, and LHR-cards which should be in keeping with their MSRP - eventually. It remains to be seen whether or not we'll have to cope with yet another scalping arms race for the LHR cards as well, since there is surely a significant market still hungering for the 30-series performance.
47 Comments on NVIDIA Officially Announces RTX 30-series LHR Lineup
If I were a nvidia and was trying this. I wouldn't segment the market. I would make everything LHR except the /actual/ mining specific cards.
2 years of current prices will be disastrous for the PC gaming market. Doing nothing is not a solution imo. Mining has the potential to have an enourmous negative impact on gaming if it lasts too long and Nvidia knows this.
Gave birth to their ray-tracing child and killed it right away.
and whattomine reports that ERG is $15 when ETH is just $12, maybe not for long, but still what's the point. to limit just one.
just disable the CUDA capability completely or something.
For this to work they would have to release cards that have been designed specifically for identifing mining alogrithms, which will evolve with time, and have a team of people working 24/7 to keep the detection system up to date, which is not what they have right now.
If i was a miner i would try to identify precisely what are the triggers that would activate the LHR system and adapt my algorithm to avoid detection. Shouldn't be too hard. I give LHR a month or less before a workaround emerges.
might as well just wait until 2023 at this point when there will be an oversupply of all silicon, once those new factories get going. not only will things be MSRP then, but probably on sale as well cause so much supply overload.
According to Hardware Unboxed, AIBs and the rest of the supply chain are to blame, which makes sense as the cards are priced double when available in stores here.
Now the pool of competition is with gamers and scalpers. As more gamers get their card of choice it becomes harder for scalpers to make a profit. During this period look for scalpers to gradually lower their prices as their ill gotten product stock loses its artificially inflated value,.....look but don’t buy from them.
It should be pointed out that in many cases if you’re diligent you can probably still buy a card. There is stock out there being sold, it just goes quickly. Signup for stock alerts and when alerted be prepared to drop everything and attempt to buy (having already setup an account / payment method from the e-tailer). If it doesn’t work then try again. I was able to buy three PS5 units this way (for family members). Now I need to try with video cards.
2. Not gonna buy second hands 30xx series even for 100 bucks.
3. Waiting for next gen.
out of all the gpu mining farms i've seen all of them have gigabyte, msi or zotac branding all over them. pretty sure my next motherboard will be supermicro. (fingers crossed)