Gigabyte lists RTX 3060 “Lite Hash Rate” GPUs on their website

Nvidia’s LHR (Lite Hash Rate) RTX 3060 graphics cards have made their way onto Gigabyte’s website (as spotted by @momomo_us), revealing mining-nerfed versions of their RTX 3060 Aorus Master, Vision OC, Gaming OC, Eagle OC and Eagle models. 

These new graphics cards are listed as version 2.0 variants of their existing models, confirming that Gigabyte and Nvidia do not intend to market these new GPUs any differently than their standard RTX 3060 equivalents. 

Nvidia’s LHR technology is designed to throttle Ethereum mining performance, drastically lowering the cryptocurrency mining potential of these graphics card. This mining nerf should be effective on Ethereum and its derivative cryptocurrencies, with Ethereum being the most profitable currency to mine on modern GPUs at the time of writing.

Nvidia’s LHR graphics cards will be seen as a great move by pure gamers, as this mining nerf (and the branding confusion caused by these new models) will make it more difficult for cryptocurrency miners to purchase non-LHR RTX 3060 graphics cards. This will allow more RTX 3060 graphics cards to make it into gaming systems, which is good news for the PC market. 

While Nvidia’s LHR GPU models are good news for pure gamers, it cannot be denied that Nvidia is removing a useful feature of their Ampere product line. Nvidia has the profit-motivation to remove Ethereum mining as a feature of their Geforce product line, as Nvidia has launched its new mining-optimised CMP series products. While this move will help improve GPU availability for gamers, Nvidia’s move with LHR Geforce GPUs can also be seen as anti-consumer. Should Nvidia be telling its users how to use their graphics cards?