Nvidia has provided some graphics cards with the so-called LHR lock to make the graphics cards less attractive for mining cryptocurrencies.
The graphics cards of the LHR series are offered as “Lite Hash Rate” models and achieve significantly lower performance than the models without the LHR add-on, especially when mining cryptocurrencies. The graphics cards should therefore be less attractive for the mining community and should be available to all gamers.
With the latest NB Miner 41.0, however, cryptocurrency miners have managed to bypass the LHR lock on Nvidia graphics cards. The new miner should make it possible to exploit the full mining performance of the LHR graphics card under both Windows and Linux.
A first miner was only recently released under Windows, which was able to significantly improve the mining performance of the LHR graphics cards. So far, however, the LHR lock might not be bypassed in the latest models of the GeForce RTX 3050 or GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB, with the latest NB Miner 41.0 the LHR lock should now be able to be bypassed in all graphics cards.
As the prices and availability of current graphics cards improve once more, it can be eagerly awaited whether Nvidia will continue the cat-and-mouse game with the miners or whether the company will remove the LHR locks from future graphics cards. Similar to video game copy protection mechanisms, the LHR locks only seem to work effectively for a shorter period of time following the graphics cards are released.