Supposedly unhackable RTX 3060 allegedly hacked to improve crypto mining

What you need to know

• People have allegedly hacked the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 to bypass the card's hash rate limiter.
• NVIDIA placed a hash rate limiter on the RTX 3060 to make it less alluring to crypto miners.
• The hackers appear to have managed a way to work around the limiter in only two weeks.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 competes with the best graphics cards you can buy. It's so good, in fact, that NVIDIA took several steps to try to get it into the hands of gamers rather than crypto miners. One of those steps was to limit the hash rate of the RTX 3060 graphic card in certain circumstances to make it less alluring to miners.

NVIDIA told PC Gamer that the card's "software cannot be hacked to remove the limiter." NVIDIA later clarified to PCGamer, stating, "End users cannot remove the hash limiter from the driver. There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the hash rate limiter."

Despite NVIDIA's claims, it appears that people have managed to hack the supposedly unhackable. Only 14 days after the GPU launched, images have emerged that claim a modified driver can be installed to get around the Ethereum hash rate limiter.

These claims have to be taken with a grain of salt. A single Facebook group appears to be the only source of these images. They show RTX 3060 GPUs operating above 45MH/s. PCGamer points out that these images could be altered or taken before the hash limiter kicked in.

For comparison, you can expect the RTX 3060 Ti hash rate to be around 60MH/s.

If there is indeed a way to bypass the hash rate limiter by installing a modified driver, it would make the RTX 3060 one of the best mining GPUs. Though, the RTX 3060 Ti would still deliver better value. If the pictured figures hold up in real-world testing, miners could choose to use the RTX 3060 over the RTX 3060 Ti or other more expensive graphics cards, depending on their budget and setup.