GPU mining has become big business. This forced players and miners to compete for a limited supply, driving up the price. Nvidia deserves credit for developing its low hash rate (LHR) cards that have held up over time and helped with provisioning. Curiously, Nvidia’s mobile GPUs don’t come with hash rate limiters. With that in mind, a Chinese manufacturer has apparently taken RTX 3060 mobile GPUs and repurposed them into desktop cards aimed at miners.
News of the cards came via Tom’s Hardware and cnBeta, where a Weibo user posted information about the cards for sale on Gofish, a Chinese second-hand goods platform. These are the cards that would contain the GeForce RTX 3060 mobile GPU which bypasses Nvidia’s Ethereum anti-mining limiter.
We’ve written extensively about the impact of mining on GPU availability and pricing. Cards like the desktop RTX 3060 don’t produce the highest hash rates, but they do well in terms of efficiency, in hashes per watt. In real terms, this is the true measure of whether a GPU is a good miner or not.
The problem for miners – and the advantage for gamers – is that the currently available RTX 3060s are all LHR builds. Some early RTX 3060s might be unlocked, but they’re almost certainly no longer available anywhere, except maybe some special locale under the counter.
But, given that the mobile RTX 3060 uses the same GA106 GPU, but can mine at full performance, it really makes sense to use unlocked silicon in a desktop form factor. They are better at mining, but really don’t do anything new for players.
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Although the desktop and mobile RTX 3060 both use the same GA106 GPU, they are configured differently. The desktop chip packs 3584 shaders and uses 12GB of memory, while the mobile version packs 3840 shaders with just 6GB of memory. These 6 GB are not (yet) a limitation for miners and its much lower TDP is advantageous. Plus, there’s the fact that its memory bandwidth isn’t much lower than the desktop RTX 3060 (336GB/s vs. 360GB/s). These two features make it a desirable mining GPU over the desktop one.
The vendor of the cards demonstrated the hashing performance of the 3060M cards. They are shown to achieve 50 MH/s compared to the 34 MH/s of a desktop LHR 3060. It’s the kind of number that makes us wonder why another manufacturer didn’t do it sooner. It should be relatively simple to update the 3060 BIOS to accommodate a 3060M. Although that’s probably easier said than done.
Using such cards is certainly more cost effective than buying gaming laptop pallets and should leave more standard RTX 3060s for gamers. As we speak though, it looks like stories like this will lose relevance as signs continue to point to an end to the crunch in mining supply, or demand, or both. We could even envisage a return to parity in a few months. Although that could still be wishful thinking.
As time passes and Ethereum’s move to its new proof-of-stake consensus mechanism draws closer, the hope is that GPU mining will die as a result. There are no coins that yield as much mining profit as Ethereum. So for now, the signs look good that the majority of graphics cards will once again end up in the hands of gamers and not those of miners.
Until the next GPU mining resurgence, I guess.
