When the RTX 3060 was released last month, Nvidia said that they implemented special "unhackable" methods that would limit the ability to mine cryptocurrency. This was done in an effort to stop miners from buying up all of the GPUs so that actual game playing consumers would be able to buy the cards instead. That all sounds great, in theory. In practice, well it's another matter entirely.
As it turns out, the protections that Nvidia implemented in the 3060 can be bypassed without having to modify a driver or tinker with the BIOS. Why? Because Nvidia's own 470.05 beta driver unlocks the crypto mining all on its own. The performance unlock in these drivers were first revealed by PC Watch and then later confirmed by ComputerBase and Hardwareluxx.
The beta driver unlocks Ethereum mining performance across the RTX 3060 lineup. This probably wasn't intended by Nvidia. In fact, the drivers were released for developers to test out the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) performance along with features like OpenCL 3.0 support.
At the time of the 3060's release, Nvidia was adamant that their protections were "not just a driver thing" when the card released. Nvidia's head of communications Bryan Del Rizzo said that "there is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS that prevents removal of the hash rate limiter." And yet this restriction was lifted by a simple driver update that Nvidia themselves just released. So, it looks as though those deep protections were a lie.
Good job, Nvidia.
