RTX 3060 and the fight against mining: will the GA106-302 GPU reset the limiter?

The GeForce RTX 3060 introduced in late February represents the first video card with which Nvidia has tried to limit (halve) the performance of your GPUs in cryptocurrency mining (not all, only the Dagger-Hashimoto and similar Ethash algorithms).

The US company says it has acted both on the firmware of the card and on the drivers but, as we know, with a sensational error it sabotaged itself by releasing a driver without this limiter. That was enough, albeit with some hitches that were later overcome, to allow miners to use the RTX 3060 in their own configurations.

However, the situation could change in the near future. According to HKEPC website, Nvidia is poised to move to a hardware-based approach to curb sales to miners. In fact, there would be one on the way new variant of the GA106 GPU, and more precisely the next RTX 3060 will no longer be based on the GA106-300, but on the GA106-302.

This change would be needed for introduce a new PCI Device ID for the card, in order to make any existing drivers incompatible. The site adds that the GA106-302 GPU would also have unspecified “additional mechanisms” to make life difficult for miners.

The new 302 variant of the GA106 GPU is expected to debut in May and in terms of specifications it should not have any changes compared to version 300. According to insiders, moreover, they could arrive new variants of the GA102 and GA104 chips (on board the cards from the RTX 3060 Ti up to the RTX 3090) in order to slow down the performance in mining also on the other existing models.