Cancelled Gigabyte RTX 3080 Ti 20GB Achieves 98 MH/s in Ethereum Mining

[Uskompuf]

NVIDIA was originally planning to release the RTX 3080 Ti with 20 GB of memory however this was changed shortly before the official announcement to 12 GB. This plan came very close to fruition with NVIDIA manufacturing and distributing these GPU's to board partners including Gigabyte, some of these completed cards have now been sold in limited quantities. The Gigabyte RTX 3080 Ti 20 GB Gaming OC was purchased by a Russian YouTuber who tested the card's cryptocurrency mining performance and uploaded the BIOS to our GPU database.

The RTX 3080 Ti 20 GB lacks official NVIDIA Game Ready drivers with Gigabyte Russia denying the existence of the model making cryptocurrency mining the only viable use for the product. The card doesn't feature the Lite Hash Rate (LHR) algorithm NVIDIA has been including on all their new cards including the RTX 3080 Ti 12 GB giving it excellent performance in Ethereum mining. The retailer had pre-configured the card with a 100 MHz boost clock increase and a 1000 MHz boost to the memory speed along with a TDP limiter of 80%.





The RTX 3080 Ti 20 GB achieved a mining hash rate of 94 MH/s in both Gminer and NBminer which is 63% higher than the LHR RTX 3080 Ti 12 GB. The retailer advertised a maximum rate of 97.99 MH/s which could be possible if the card wasn't also being used for streaming as it appears to have been in this test.
The YouTuber purchased the Gigabyte RTX 3080 Ti 20 GB Gaming OC model from a retailer in St. Petersburg for 225,000 rubles (~3,070 USD). This price means the card could potentially pay for itself within ~400 days given current Ethereum prices. The complete video in Russian can be viewed below.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[wolf]

Interesting, do we know any other specs, namely core count? I'd have thought it was going to effectively be a double memory 3080, but they decided to go more like a half memory 3090.

 

[Sybaris_Caesar]

A miner got his filthy mittens on a card that didn't release yet, but actually cancelled before release. Why am I fucking NOT surprised.

 

[Mussels]

A miner got his filthy mittens on a card that didn't release yet, but actually cancelled before release. Why am I fucking NOT surprised.

Well it literally says it cant be used for anything else without the drivers so...

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

A previous new story had the 3080Ti mining at 117MH/s.

 

[Chrispy_]

Interesting, do we know any other specs, namely core count? I'd have thought it was going to effectively be a double memory 3080, but they decided to go more like a half memory 3090.

Double memory 3080 doesn't have any more memory bandwidth than the 10GB variant, since they achieve that by simply using double density chips.

ETH hashrate is almost entirely bandwidth-limited so it could have 68 SMs like the 10GB or 82SMs like the 3090 and you'd struggle to identify any change in hashrate.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

Smells like an inside job...

the same way MSI was caught smuggling their cards to cryptominers - Although MSI obviously deny it was them but those are a lot of cards especially when people are struggling to get their hands on even just one of them due to availability or stupidly high price. £2400-2700 for a 3090... No amount of wages is ever worth that and it is a grossly impractical use of money. You could buy so many cheap cars or even one decent car and it will out last be more practical then a 3090.

 

[Aquinus]

People with money to piss up the wall have to have the latest crap, be it to show off how rich they are on forums, or play their games at 4k, it's these morons driving the price up and driving the market for higher priced cards on eBay etc. Only the people who can't afford them whine. Me I don't care, if stroking your ego with a 2 grand video card is your thing, fine.

I mean, they're the ones who buy the most expensive GPUs and is why those are expensive, but they're not directly the cause of the shortage because the cost of what would normally be considered high-end mainstream cards are also insanely priced. The simple fact is that crypto is driving most of this. Everyone wants to make a free buck, even if that ROI isn't for several months.

 

[MentalAcetylide]

People with money to piss up the wall have to have the latest crap, be it to show off how rich they are on forums, or play their games at 4k, it's these morons driving the price up and driving the market for higher priced cards on eBay etc.

Only the people who can't afford them whine. Me I don't care, if stroking your ego with a 2 grand video card is your thing, fine.

This is absolutely mint. Blame and insult gamers & non-crypto-miners in general that can afford to buy them, and then follow it up with a contradiction.
I've said it once before, and I'll say it again for your reading displeasure: it would make zero difference if gamers/non-crypto-miners suddenly stopped buying any and all graphics cards. The only thing this would accomplish is allowing more of these cards to reach the hands of crypto-miners. The pricing and lack of availability will still be there, which means you still will be unable to buy it.

If I have the funds and I need the card, I'm buying it, and no volume of cancel culture rhetoric is going to change that, which is basically what those regurgitated claims amount to. Whoever started that propaganda must've had their panties in a bunch because their neighbor up the street was able to afford one while they can't, or maybe they just let their jealousy get the best of them.
Either way, the price I, and others of similar ilk, have to pay for a graphics card has no bearing on someone else's financial inability to acquire one in the current market.

 

[trsttte]

I'm only surprised this didn't surface sooner, the 12gb on the 3080ti were very strange and the gddr6x availability didn't really convince me in the slightest (it was the excuse for the 3080ti, not enough gddr to make 3090's)

It's unfortunate that nvidia decided to say fuck it and stick with the 1200$ but it's either them making extra bucks or scalpers so whatever I guess.

 

[MentalAcetylide]

Wouldn't say unable, there are loads on a certain UK website available. Jealousy, always the same bullshit response to comments some people don't like, eat a fat one pal.

Nothing to do with not affording, it's about wasting £2k on a video card, some people have families, and other financial commitments that don't warrant pissing 2000 quid away on a video card. Ok if your partner doesn't mind i guess.

I'll stick with my 980ti and peasant 1080p screen for now.

Wait, you can either afford it or you can't; you either buy one because you need it or you don't because you think its a waste. There's no skirting around the edges here. Whatever the case, I fail to see the point of your diatribe then. If its not jealousy, then what else would prompt someone to post the response I quoted previously and the above juvenile response?

Yes, stick to your 980ti & 1080p screen if it does what you need it to do, but don't be coming on here with an attitude trying to blame & shame others that can or need to upgrade while pointing your finger at them for your current "predicament". If you don't like it, well then write a book about it. You might win a Russell Prize.

 

[R-T-B]

A miner got his filthy mittens on a card that didn't release yet, but actually cancelled before release. Why am I fucking NOT surprised.

You could try outbidding him. Not like he got it cheap.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

A cancelled unicorn poo does what, who cares?!.

 

[TheUn4seen]

Me? I love my 3080. It was essentially free thanks to mining and paid for most of my electrical bill this year, not to mention getting me into trading crypto. Still does pay some of my bills actually, so I'm inclined to say that "it's so expensive, hurr durr" rhetoric is completely misplaced.

 

[95Viper]

Stop the BS, insulting, and arguing.
Stay on topic.

 

[MentalAcetylide]

Me? I love my 3080. It was essentially free thanks to mining and paid for most of my electrical bill this year, not to mention getting me into trading crypto. Still does pay some of my bills actually, so I'm inclined to say that "it's so expensive, hurr durr" rhetoric is completely misplaced.

Yeah, that would've been nice! Spend less than half of what I did on my current build about 4 years ago for a 3-4 card mining rig and I would've made money on top of paying nothing for my current system build. A render farm would've been feasible for sure then! But(no pun intended) hindsight is always 20/20.

 

[wolf]

ETH hashrate is almost entirely bandwidth-limited

I know how that works, my curiosity is from the perspective of how it would perform in gaming. Would it have been a 3080 through and through until over 10gb was needed, or did it have a different core and clock configuration.

 

[Chrispy_]

I know how that works, my curiosity is from the perspective of how it would perform in gaming. Would it have been a 3080 through and through until over 10gb was needed, or did it have a different core and clock configuration.

The point I was making is that there is absolutely zero way to find that out from mining performance. Even the altcoins like Raven don't fully-load the GPU cores, so the 20GB variant could have any number of SMs and we'd be none the wiser.

Given that all the other Ti models have increased SM counts, it's reasonable to assume that the cancelled 20GB variant has more SMs than the 3080 10GB but until more info is posted by Nvidia or an AIB like Gigabyte, we'll be in the dark. I believe even GPU-Z's core config display is just a database lookup from the GPU ID rather than a live response from the driver when queried by GPU-Z. I'm sure @W1zzard can confirm if that's the case.

 

[wolf]

it's reasonable to assume that the cancelled 20GB variant has more SMs than the 3080 10GB but until more info is posted by Nvidia or an AIB like Gigabyte, we'll be in the dark.

Yeah I wasn't thinking of it in a mining sense at all, I wanted to look at the bios file and see if there was any more info/ probe W1z and perhaps the news team if they knew. Just a curiosity of what these 20gb 3080(ti's) would have been if they made it to market.

 

[Chrispy_]

Yeah I wasn't thinking of it in a mining sense at all, I wanted to look at the bios file and see if there was any more info/ probe W1z and perhaps the news team if they knew. Just a curiosity of what these 20gb 3080(ti's) would have been if they made it to market.

That information has never been in any VBIOS files that I've edited - VBIOS generally covers things like timings/clocks/voltages/power limits/display outputs but not core configs.

It's a bit like your motherboard, it doesn't know much about the CPU core count or cache levels other than what description is given it in a deviceID lookup table. If your BIOS is old and a newer processor boots but isn't in the firmware's list of deviceIDs you'll just see "unknown processor".

 

[eidairaman1]

Smells like an inside job...

the same way MSI was caught smuggling their cards to cryptominers - Although MSI obviously deny it was them but those are a lot of cards especially when people are struggling to get their hands on even just one of them due to availability or stupidly high price. £2400-2700 for a 3090... No amount of wages is ever worth that and it is a grossly impractical use of money. You could buy so many cheap cars or even one decent car and it will out last be more practical then a 3090.

No wonder i dont like msi,this is another reason...

 

[kanecvr]

No amount of wages is ever worth that and it is a grossly impractical use of money. You could buy so many cheap cars or even one decent car and it will out last be more practical then a 3090.

This^

Manufacturers should take notice. We will not spend this much on a video card.