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.
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.
