Nvidia's AIB Partners Will Show Which Ampere Cards Have a Mining Limiter.

Ampere Graphics Cards
(Image credit: Nvidia)

We reported a few weeks back that Nvidia might be replacing its current RTX 3000 series GPUs with new GPU cores featuring a hardware-based anti-Ethereium mining limiter. But now according to Igor's Lab, there's more evidence for this plan with AIB partners being told on how to market these new 'mining limited' GPUs.

According to Igor, Nvidia is in the process of figuring out how to label these new GPUs, to make it easier for consumers to understand if they are getting an RTX 3000 graphics card that has the hardware-based mining limiter or not. For now, it seems Nvidia partners are free to market the new mining limited cards in whatever way they want, as long as the card can be identified as a mining limited card or not.

This is good news for gamers and miners. Letting consumers know if the Ampere card they are buying is mining limiter or not directly on the model name will yield less confusion overall. There's still some concern on how these will actually be labeled, however, with jokes of 'Limited Edition' or 'Gaming Edition' potentially have some painful truth.

There are also gamers that want to mine in their spare time, as a way to help recoup some of the cost of the graphics card. With cards like the RTX 3080 pulling in over $8 per day for the past several months (our how to mine Ethereum guide has addition details), plenty of people don't want artificially limited GPUs. AMD for its part has said it has no plans to introduce hash rate limiters, leaving it up to the end users to decide what they want to do with their cards.

Back to the Nvidia GPUs, previously, there was concern that the only way to identify the hash-rate limite cards would be through identifying the GPU core model. That would require actually purchasing and booting up a card. Which, you know, isn't really easy to do regardless, but whatever. If there's clear labeling, however, that's no longer a concern. Whether there will be enough cards to go around remains the bigger problem.

The various RTX 3000 cards rank among the best graphics cards, and they were already selling well above MSRP before the current Ethereum mining resurgence kicked off. Even if mining disappears, it's unlikely we'll see a return to 'normal' pricing any time soon.

Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

  • peachpuff
    Limited edition gets my vote.
    Reply
  • digitalgriffin
    Again, how quickly prices come back down will all depend on supply contracts with AIB partners. Once the contract obligation is met, NVIDIA is no longer obligated to supply them the good hash rate chips. But you can bet AIBs will milk every last chipset they can given the margins.

    That said, it will still be 1yr+ until it pays out for gamers and AIB's are FORCED to lower their prices. (Unless crypto crashes) And NVIDIA really needs to prevent all major coin from being mined if this is to be effective.
    Reply
  • jpe1701
    The price will never be back to what it was. They have figured out that after a crisis passes or whatever has happened to the market has passed they can leave the price way higher and we will just buy it without any real backlash anyways. I always complain about it when I look at the prices of motherboards.
    Reply