Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti: an Ethereum mining monster?
The RTX 3080 Ti with 12 GB GDDR6X RAM is rumoured to be released in May. A leak has now shown the potential Ethereum mining hash rate of 118.9 Mh/s – despite announced crypto mining limiter.
It's not an easy time for gamers. Graphics cards are a rare commodity. Hardly any graphics cards are available due to the semiconductor shortage – and when they become available, crypto miners always seem to get their hands on all of them. As it seems, Nvidia is releasing the RTX 3080 Ti in May – another card that you’ll hardly be able to buy. The card hasn’t been officially announced yet. Therefore, please treat all information here with caution.
Various leaks about the card's potential performance have been going around in recent weeks. It’s been reported that the card with GA102-225 chip boasts 10,240 Cuda cores and 12 GB of GDDR6X RAM. That is 2 GB of memory and around 1,500 cores more than the RTX 3080 and would mean the RTX 3080 Ti has almost as many Cuda cores as the RTX 3090 with 10,496.
Although Nvidia wants to release said card with crypto mining limiter, a new leak now also shows the potential Ethereum mining hash rate of 118.9 Mh/s. However, this card is optimised for mining. The TDP was lowered to 278 watts and the RAM clocked to 21.4 Gbps. Still, the card seems perfect for mining Ethereum. That’s bad news for gamers, as miners will likely snap up all these cards again. Plus, the RTX 3060's limiter was disabled within a short time.
Rumour has it that Nvidia also plans to install the limiter in the new variants of the existing cards. However, since the limiter depends on the driver, which doesn’t recognise the card, it seems likely that an old driver is used in the leak. A base clock of 1365 MHz and a boost clock of 1665 MHz can also be seen. That’s less than the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. It seems that Nvidia has to put on the brakes here to make sure it doesn’t compete too strongly with the flagship 3090 card.
What do you think, is there any truth to these leaks? Is the crypto mining limiter any good at all? Or have you lost all interest in graphics cards because they’re impossible to get hold of at the moment? Let me know in the comments.
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