Are you surprised by the shortages of laptops on the market? The reason is China, which is bypassing the LHR restriction

You probably know that NVIDIA has started limiting the performance of the GeForce RTX 3000 in mining cryptocurrencies using so-called LHR restrictions. These are not present in mobile models, and this is what Chinese OEMs have used when selling the GeForce RTX 3060 and 3070.

Shortages of laptops on the market due to Chinese tricks

In practice, these laptop graphics cards are advertised as mining-specific models, which is somewhat of a surprise nowadays, as the limitations of LHRv2 cards and almost all of LHRv3 have already been lifted. In China, this procedure has been going on for months, and at the moment there are no indications that NVIDIA will want to deal with it.

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It’s a pity, because in practice, this means that fewer laptops enter the market than they should, and dishonest manufacturers transform these GPUs into graphics cards for desktops, profiting from it. But it seems NVIDIA just prefers to keep this income “alone” while making money on it as well. In turn, the mobile graphics cards themselves in their desktop versions are appropriately limited compared to stationary ones.