NVIDIA is stepping up to manufacturers of counterfeit graphics card in China according to an article published by MyDrivers - the hardware giant is partnering up with a number of the nation's major e-commerce companies in order to eliminate inventories of bogus GPUs. It is claimed that these online retail platforms, including JD.com and Douyin, are partway into removing a swathe of dodgy stock from their listings. NVIDIA is seeking to disassociate itself from the pool of unlicensed hardware and the brands responsible for flooding the domestic and foreign markets with so-called fake graphics cards. The company is reputed to be puzzled about the murky origins of this bootlegging of their patented designs.

The market became saturated with fake hardware during the Ethereum mining boom - little known cottage companies such as 51RSIC, Corn, Bingying and JieShuoMllse were pushing rebadged cheap OEM cards to domestic e-tail sites. The knock-off GPUs also crept outside of that sector, and import listings started to appear on international platforms including Ebay, AliExpress, Amazon and Newegg. NVIDIA is also fighting to stop the sale of refurbished cards - these are very likely to have been utilized in intensive cryptocurrency mining activities. A flood of these hit the market following an extreme downturn in crypto mining efforts, and many enthusiast communities have warned against acquiring pre-owned cards due to the high risk of component failure.

In a last-ditch effort to clear inventory of its GeForce RTX 30-series "Ampere" graphics cards, NVIDIA has reportedly removed the hashrate limiter in the latest GeForce 522.25 drivers, without mentioning it anywhere in the driver's release notes. A Redditor and GeForce RTX 3080 Ti owner by the username "Timbers007" rested that their card, which launched exclusively as LHR-enabled graphics cards (with no RTX 3080 Ti cards without LHR in circulation); is now achieving double its usual hashrates when benchmarked with ethminer. It's able to put out 112 MH/s, a hashrate only possible with mining software that circumvents the LHR limiter, such as NiceHash or NBMiner.

In the thick of the graphics card shortage in 2020-21, as crypto currency miners were buying up inventory of gaming graphics cards through sophisticated retail bots; NVIDIA attempted to sour the milk for miners by introducing LHR (lite hashrate), a supposedly hardware-level limitation that cripples the mining performance of the GPU. This failed to improve things as NVIDIA accidentally released drivers without the hashrate limiter early on and redacted them, but not before they spread among miners. It was only a titanic crash in crypto-currency values, and the recent Ethereum merge that killed GPU-accelerated mining, which arrested demand, bringing RTX 30-series GPUs to prices more acceptable to gamers, as miners began flooding the market with their used GPUs at much lower prices. Will this improve sales of the RTX 30-series? Unlikely. Miners with RTX 30-series LHR graphics cards who already had the hacks to circumvent the limiter, are dumping their cards.

NVIDIA Ada and AMD RDNA3 will not sell to Ethereum miners. In a dramatic move, the creators of Ethereum have switched over the popular crypto-currency's algorithm from proof-of-work, to proof-of-stake, which means miners will no longer spend GPU resources in competing to find the same blocks. This effectively ends GPU-accelerated mining as Ethereum mining was the number-1 consumer of high-end GPUs through 2021. The switch-over happened as the total terminal difficulty surpassed 58,750,000,000T, with the last block having been found. With this move, global electricity consumption is expected to reduce by 0.2% (that's enough to power the world's top 5 cities).

The impact of this move on GPU sales to crypto-currency miners is expected to be profound. GPUs are no longer an economical way to mine Bitcoin, ASICs are; and Ethereum mining constituted the bulk of activity from GPU-accelerated mining farms. This doesn't mean there aren't other crypto-currencies that rely on GPU-accelerated proof-of-work blockchain compute; but Ethereum had the highest market-cap among such currencies. Gamers have reason to rejoice, as NVIDIA and AMD now have to sell high-end GPUs squarely on merits of gaming performance, power-draw, and graphics card pricing.

OpenSea, one of the most widely recognized NFT markets in the cryptocurrency world, has slammed into a wall of absence. Namely, the absence of volume: the decentralized marketplace has seen a 99% drop on NFT trading volume in merely 90 days. From its high of $405.75 million on May 1, transactions on Non- Fungible Tokens have petered out to just $5 million throughout the entire month of August.

Reduced volume connects to reduced demand, which has in turn led to reducing floor prices (the lowest available price for a given NFT) for even the most recognized collections: the cheapest Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT can now be had for 72.5 ETH ($104,634 at time of writing). That's a 53% reduction in its ETH price (153.7 ETH) from May 1st. But the drop is even more massive when one takes into account the devaluation of Ethereum itself: On May 1st, the 153.7 ETH asking price for the NFT equaled $434,048 (price has thus tumbled by 76% on a dollar basis). CryptoPunks, another popular Ethereum-based NFT collection, has seen its floor price decline by a less drastic 20%.

The Intel Arc A380 has recently been tested for crypto mining performance after support for the card was added in the latest release of Nanominer. The card achieved a hash rate of 10.2 MH/s while mining Ethereum Classic (ETC) without any optimizations at a TDP of 75 W equating to 0.136 MH/s per Watt which is significantly below other popular mining cards which can reach 0.38 MH/s per Watt. This limited performance can be partially attributed to the availability of only 8 Xe-Cores and the relatively small 96-bit memory bus. The card will struggle to mine Ethereum due to its limited 6 GB of VRAM while Ethereum Classic should work fine as demonstrated.

Remember those unofficial GeForce RTX 3060 cards that sported "hackamajigged" Mobile versions of the NVIDIA RTX 3060 desktop GPU wrapped in a shiny, desktop-like shroud? Well, those cards are now surfacing again just as Ethereum's Merge approaches (for the umpteenth time, it has to be said). Miners have taken to offload their graphics cards in order to recoup their hardware investment costs. Despite the recent positive price action, which saw Ethereum in particular recovering 34% of its value in about a week, there's only so much time left to mine before all those re-purposed GPUs become "nothing more" than gaming graphics cards. And those are usually superfluous beyond one per rig - never mind the numbers used by miners.

As these cards are now surfacing in the secondary markets, some benchmarks are also leaking. According to a Korean YouTuber, It appears that the RTX 3060M is actually a pretty competent RTX 3060. The GeForce RTX 3060M makes use of the same GA106 (Ampere) silicon as the GeForce RTX 3060 Mobile, sporting 3,840 CUDA cores and 6 GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory (256 more CUDA cores than the desktop version, as wider, lesser-clocked GPUs sport better power efficiency profiles). The desktop shroud does allow it to unlock an additional 300 MHz in core frequency, while reducing its TDP from 105 W down to just 80 W.

Graphics card prices have been on a steady decline in the past few months, following their peak in May of last year when we saw double and triple pricing compared to the baseline MSRP value. According to the 3DCenter.org report, which tracks graphics card prices in Germany and Austria, we have information that AMD GPU prices have dipped below MSRP, while NVIDIA GPUs are very close to baseline listed prices. The report tracks Ethereum mining profitability and displays it in the yellow line. As the line is declining, so are the GPU prices. For AMD, the prices are now 8% below the 100% of MSRP. At 92%, consumers can find AMD GPUs at a slight discount. While AMD cards are slightly cheaper, NVIDIA GPUs are now at 102% of the MSRP, the lowest price point since the launch.

Pricing for AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards has been evolving positively for the last seven months, experiencing a downtrend that has brought street prices closer to the actual MSRP on the best graphics cards. According to 3D Center's price analysis of the Austrian and German markets, GPU pricing for both AMD and NVIDIA's latest GPUs have reached historical lows - although these lows are still at a premium over MSRP. Anyone looking to buy an AMD graphics card is now looking at an average markup of 12% over MSRP, while NVIDIA cards seem to be holding their inflated values slightly better, and still stand at 119% of MSRP.

The price action comes on the back of months of increasing supply at retailers, alongside reduced demand from Ethereum miners due to falling ETH prices ($2,912.54 at time of writing) and the expectation for Ethereum's passage to Proof of Stake (PoS) through The Merge, which is still slated for later this year. It's also likely that most customers who still haven't bought into the latest generation of GPUs from either AMD or NVIDIA are waiting for the release of Intel's competing Arc Alchemist discrete GPUs, not to mention AMD's mid-year RX 6*50 refresh and NVIDIA's next-generation graphics solutions. An exploding ETH price might bring GPU prices back up again; but until then, and at the rate prices are seemingly (at least locally) falling, it seems that consumers might finally be able to purchase GPUs at MSRP sometime after May.

The most popular cryptocurrency by market-cap, Bitcoin, has dropped in value to below the USD $40,000-mark, to $38,429 as of this writing. This amounts to a whopping 43% drop in value from its November 2021 peak of roughly $67,600. Ethereum has also seen an 8% fall over the past 24 hours, as has the value of several other cryptocurrencies. While we won't get into the nuts and bolts of Bitcoin volatility or hand out any financial advice, this could have an impact on graphics card availability owing to a multitude of reasons.

As of this writing, we see the GeForce RTX 3080 commanding a scalper price of roughly $1,500 (brand new), for the LHR variant (lower crypto-mining performance), while non-LHR cards that are used, start around $1,900. If the fall in cryptocurrencies continues, we could see increased availability of used graphics cards from crypto miners, as gamers would be willing to buy a used RTX 30-series or RX 6000 series graphics card that's still within its warranty period (of 2 years).

BadgerDAO, "one of the most security-minded DAOs in operation", has been hit with a cryptocurrency heist enabled via a JavaScript hack on their website. BadgerDAO enables Bitcoin holders to "bridge" their cryptocurrency over to the smart-contract and DeFi-enabled Ethereum platform via its token, thus allowing access to the world of decentralized finance. After preliminary investigations aided by blockchain security and data analytics Peckshield, it seems that the bad actors inserted a malicious script in the BadgerDAO website - in turn intercepting Web 3.0 transactions and inserting a request to transfer the victim's tokens to the attacker's chosen address. It's currently estimated that around $120 million were siphoned off via this attack. A single transfer saw 896 Bitcoin being diverted this way - a cool $50 million.

As soon as BadgerDAO became aware of suspect wallet activity, the company immediately froze all smart contracts running in its platform - a way to stem the bleeding until the security audit could be conducted. Thursday night, BadgerDAO announced it had "retained data forensics experts Chainalysis to explore the full scale of the incident & authorities in both the US & Canada have been informed & Badger is cooperating fully with external investigations as well as proceeding with its own."

Sapphire, along with various other AIB partners from AMD, has been making graphics cards exclusively for cryptocurrency mining. With the arrival of AMD's RDNA2 generation, this has continued as well. However, the company has been doing it more quietly to avoid backslash from its customers already furious about the poor availability of graphics cards in general. Fortunately, El Chapuzas Informatico managed to get ahold of two datasheets from Sapphire that highlight features and use cases of its GPRO X080 and GPRO X060 mining graphics cards, primarily targeting Ethereum coin mining.

According to the source, the company has readied two models based on RDNA2 chipsets. That is GPRO X080 SKU based on Navi 22 with 2304 Streaming Processors, running at 2132 MHz frequency. Paired with Navi 22 GPU, 10 GB of GDDR6 memory runs at 16 Gbps speed on a 160-bit bus. This model has no display outputs, and the only connector is a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot that connects the GPU to the motherboard. Running at the default 165 Watt TGP, the card produces a 38.0 MH/s hash rate, while the optimized form of 41.6 MH/s reduces TGP to just 93 Watts.

NVIDIA's Crypto Mining (CMP) series of graphics cards are made to work only for one purpose: mining cryptocurrency coins. Hence, their functionality is somewhat limited, and they can not be used for gaming as regular GPUs can. Today, Linus Tech Tips got ahold of NVIDIA's CMP 170HX mining card, which is not listed on the company website. According to the source, the card runs on NVIDIA's GA100-105F GPU, a version based on the regular GA100 SXM design used in data-center applications. Unlike its bigger brother, the GA100-105F SKU is a cut-down design with 4480 CUDA cores and 8 GB of HBM2E memory. The complete design has 6912 cores and 40/80 GB HBM2E memory configurations.

As far as the reason for choosing 8 GB HBM2E memory goes, we know that the Ethereum DAG file is under 5 GB, so the 8 GB memory buffer is sufficient for mining any coin out there. It is powered by an 8-pin CPU power connector and draws about 250 Watts of power. It can be adjusted to 200 Watts while retaining the 165 MH/s hash rate for Ethereum. This reference design is manufactured by NVIDIA and has no active cooling, as it is meant to be cooled in high-density server racks. Only a colossal heatsink is attached, meaning that the cooling needs to come from a third party. As far as pricing is concerned, Linus managed to get this card for $5000, making it a costly mining option.More images follow...

NVIDIA was originally planning to release the RTX 3080 Ti with 20 GB of memory however this was changed shortly before the official announcement to 12 GB. This plan came very close to fruition with NVIDIA manufacturing and distributing these GPU's to board partners including Gigabyte, some of these completed cards have now been sold in limited quantities. The Gigabyte RTX 3080 Ti 20 GB Gaming OC was purchased by a Russian YouTuber who tested the card's cryptocurrency mining performance and uploaded the BIOS to our GPU database.

The RTX 3080 Ti 20 GB lacks official NVIDIA Game Ready drivers with Gigabyte Russia denying the existence of the model making cryptocurrency mining the only viable use for the product. The card doesn't feature the Lite Hash Rate (LHR) algorithm NVIDIA has been including on all their new cards including the RTX 3080 Ti 12 GB giving it excellent performance in Ethereum mining. The retailer had pre-configured the card with a 100 MHz boost clock increase and a 1000 MHz boost to the memory speed along with a TDP limiter of 80%.

Genesis Mining, one of the largest cloud providers of cryptocurrency mining services headquartered in Iceland, has today won a great deal with China's Supreme Court. According to the reports, Genesis is now getting back the 485,000 AMD Radeon RX 470 8 GB graphics cards returned to its mining facilities in hopes of soon usage. What leads to this you might wonder? Previously, Genesis Mining partner, Chuangshiji Technology Limited, which provides hosting services for Genesis, took the company's mining hardware and started listing it without consent from the Iceland-based firm.

As the company filed a lawsuit in China supreme court, the legal disputes were going on for some time and today Genesis has won. According to the report, Genesis is getting back as much as 485,000 AMD Radeon RX 470 8 GB graphics cards with a total mining power of 14.5 TH/s. All these GPUs are now looking for a new home inside Genesis Mining facilities and will be able to provide a bit over a million dollars in mined Ethereum, at today's prices.

The latest version of NBMiner, a software that helps you mine Ethereum, purportedly restores up to 70% of the mining performance of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30-series GPUs with LHR (lite hash-rate). The latest batches of the company's GeForce RTX 3080, RTX 3070, RTX 3060 Ti, and RTX 3060, are LHR by default, meaning that the GPUs feature a mining hash-rate limiter that throttles the GPU when faced with workloads resembling mining; with the idea being that they become unviable for miners.

The latest NBMiner update doesn't completely restore mining performance for LHR, but works around the LHR restrictions. The ETH mining hashrate is increased from 50% to 68-70%, which is a definite improvement. This is also the first public miner with improvements made to LHR GPU mining performance. Until now, only private mining groups have claimed to develop custom miners with workarounds for LHR GPUs.

ASRock expects that GPU shipments will grow in Q2 2021 despite the global component shortages and an anticipated decline in Chinese cryptocurrency mining demand. ASRock believes that GPU availability will improve in H2 2021 as supply chain constraints are alleviated which will hopefully apply some downwards pressure on pricing. China currently accounts for a large portion of global cryptocurrency mining hardware demand but as restrictions are introduced this demand is expected to fall drastically. Ethereum is also expected to move to a Proof-of-Stake system later this year which will drastically reduce mining profitability.

Millions of bytes have been written regarding the current GPU market conditions already, which pairs strained logistics channels due to COVID-19 with increased quarantine-fueled demand by gamers - while also throwing in semiconductor manufacturing woes, miners, and scalpers. All in all, it seems that miners and scalpers managed to get their hands on roughly 25% (around 700,000) of distributed current-gen graphics cards during Q1 2021 which, for some reason, seems much lower than the general perception on their impact on this market.

With that said, Reddit user @gregable aggregated daily pricing for GPUs on Ebay and then calculated the GPU's $/hashrate for Ethereum mining. With hashrates remaining steady for graphics cards, this effectively establishes a price trend for GPUs. The news are good, for once: prices are falling, with the average $ cost per MH falling from $26 on May 16th down to $20 as of yesterday. The move is supported mostly by price drops on high hash-rate graphics cards such as the RTX 3090 (a 32% price drop during this period) and RTX 3080/RTX 3070 graphics cards (which dropped by 25%).

The cryptocurrency market is experiencing another major shakedown in pricing, with the overall crypto market valuation dropping by more than a trillion dollars in less than 24 hours. As of time of writing, leading cryptocurrency by market cap Bitcoin has lost more than 30% in value, dropping to $31,000. Ethereum is down by 40% to $2,424, and memecoin Dogecoin has fallen by 45% - one would think a memecoin would have had its value dropped to zero from the instant of its conception, but that's not the world we live in.

As the market tries to staunch the bleeding, major cryptocurrency platforms Coinbase and Binance are down, citing "network congestion" issues stemming from the unexpected volatility. As investors see their attempts to sell neutered by these network congestion issues, this seems like a way to reduce the amount of cryptocurrencies available in the market, which would feed the descending value cycle even more. Whether or not this is the bubble popping, it's yet another foundational shock to the trust that was already achieved by these platforms and the cryptocurrency market as a whole. How this will affect market availability and demand for graphics cards and hardware is anyone's guess, but even if it does, it'll take some time until we see availability in the main and secondary channels.

The deployment of PoS (Proof of Stake) in Ethereum - called The Merge - has been a target for the development teams for a while now - and yet it still hasn't see the light of day. However, we have been slowly clambering towards it, and the Ethereum team has issued a blog post that places that transition "in the coming months", which likely means a hard PoS fork closer to years' end. Of course, the timeline still gives miners some time make up for hardware investment costs, but perhaps some of them (the smallest ones at least) will start offloading their graphics cards soon so as to enjoy the higher, current second-hand pricing for the latest and greatest GPUs.

The implementation of PoS in Ethereum is expected to reduce power consumption by a ridiculous 95.95% - from a country-sized 44.49 TWh with the current PoW (Proof of Work) technology down to a comparably measly 2.62 megawatt estimate. The Merge should therefore aid Ethereum in not only becoming greener, but also increasing network security, reducing likelihood of 51% attacks, and allowing for further operational scaling of the network. The more skeptical of you will say that miners will just choose another profitable coin to mine, but we have to consider Ethereum's market cap and current valuation - there is currently no other coin that seems to be able to absorb the hashing power currently devoted to Ethereum without crashing its profitability for any and everyone involved. We might be looking at a relatively healthy second-hand graphics card market by the end of the year. Wouldn't that be nice?

NVIDIA today has officially announced what we have gotten to know through sheer power of will, speculation, and leaks. The company took to a blog post to announce a new, revised lineup of RTX 30-series graphics cards, spanning from the RTX 3060 all the way to the premium RTX 3080 graphics card. All of these will now ship with a new silicon revision (the last 0 has been replaced with a 2, so we're now looking at GA102-202, GA04-302, etc.). LHR effectively halves each of these graphics cards' output in Ethereum mining, which is currently the greatest driver behind mining (and scalping) acquisition of graphics cards.

NVIDIA has also clarified that AIB partners will be clearly labeling their graphics cards with stickers denoting their "LHR" nature, both in the box and card itself, so that customers can know with utmost certainty what they are actually acquiring - though this only applies to newly-manufactured graphics cards, and not to the ones already in the retail channel, for obvious reasons. We are thus looking at a situation where we can find ourselves with two secondary markets for NVIDIA's RTX 30-series cards: one for miners, with non-LHR graphics cards and sold at much-inflated prices, and LHR-cards which should be in keeping with their MSRP - eventually. It remains to be seen whether or not we'll have to cope with yet another scalping arms race for the LHR cards as well, since there is surely a significant market still hungering for the 30-series performance.

GALAX has now become the first NVIDIA partner from whom some details on how NVIDIA's push to limit the mining hash rates on their graphics cards will turn out. The new GALAX graphics cards in question are the already-released, unicorn-like RTX 3070 and RTX 3080. The GALAX packaging doesn't seem to have any differences compared to their original launch packaging for these graphics cards, though; however, the product pages for these respective products do have an additional [FG] compared to the original releases. This seems to be in-line with NVIDIA's decision not to differentiate between LHR and non-LHR cards at a packaging level, so as to reduce desirability for miners to just keep gobbling up remaining supply for the non-LHR graphics cards still in the channel.

As we already knew before, the LHR graphics cards feature an NVIDIA-designed solution that identifies the workload you're putting your card through and artificially halves its performance for Ethereum mining workloads. Of course, NVIDIA would prefer to have miners buying their mining-specific CMP (Crypto Mining Processor) cards and free up demand from their gaming-oriented RTX cards, effectively feeding two very distinct markets. It remains to be seen whether this new NVIDIA hashrate limitation survives more than a few days compared to their latest attempt at such a solution.

Salad Technologies is inviting PC gamers to help build the world's largest supercomputer with their idle rigs in return for digital rewards, following milestone performance metrics on its distributed computing network. The company is launching a marketplace that will lend the combined processing power of its PC gamer user base to partners' advanced computing tasks. In time, private individuals running Salad's application will compete against multimillion dollar supercomputers.

Since its founding in 2018, Salad has made "Chefs" of more than 250,000 PC gamers, leveraging the idle processing power of their hardware to validate blockchain transactions through an open-source desktop app. While away from the keyboard, Salad users share compute resources to earn rewards value for games, gift cards, and subscriptions from a library of more than 15,000 digital rewards.

TSMC will be manufacturing next-generation 5 nm ASICs for Bitmain. The company designs purpose-built machines for mining crypto-currency, using ASICs. DigiTimes reports that the 5 nm volume production could kick off form Q3-2021. Bitmain's latest Antminer ASIC-based mining machines announced last month were purported to be up to 32 times faster than a GeForce RTX 3080 at mining Ethereum. Recent history has shown that whenever ASICs catch up or beat GPUs at mining, prices of GPUs tend to drop. With no 5 nm GPUs on the horizon for Q3-2021, one really can expect market pressure from crypto-miners to drop off when Antminers gain traction.

Remember that story regarding NVIDIA relaunching a new RTX 3060 SKU that actually does limit the hash rate for Ethereum mining workloads? Well, not only has it been cemented, but it also has been expanded. Reports are coming in that all but confirm that NVIDIA is on its way to provide its partners with updated silicon that should put mining performance of their RTX 30-series cards into a less palatable price-performance territory for would-be miners. That, in turn, should bring them closer to NVIDIA's CMP (Crypto Mining Processor) cards instead - and as wanted by both the company and consumers.

According to the sources, the new graphics cards will be indistinguishable from those that are still in transit or in stock (all two of them worldwide, of course). NVIDIA is internally describing the revised silicon as "Lite Hash Rate", and that is the message they communicate with AIBs. Apparently, the new "Lite Hash Rate" graphics cards will range throughout the entirety of NVIDIA's already-released RTX 30-series portfolio, from the ill-fated RTX 3060 up to the RTX 3080 Ti - the only absent graphics card is the RTX 3090, apparently, which could mean that NVIDIA is confident enough on that graphics card's cost being too high to be attractive to miners - especially when you consider how much more they are going for above the MSRP that was half-heartedly slapped on it. The new chips carry an update to their SKU identification - the GA102-200 chip that powers the RTX 3080 is being revised to GA102-202, as will all other chips made "lite" in this way. Expect the new cards to start hitting retail come June.

Antminer has recently announced their most powerful Ethereum miner yet the E9 with performance of 3 GH/s as the price of Ethereum reaches all-time highs. The Chinese manufacturer advertises that this is equivalent to 32 NVIDIA RTX 3080 cards while coming in with significantly less power consumption and likely a lower price. The Antminer E9 achieves its 3 GH/s mining speed with a power consumption of just 2556 W which gives it an efficiency of 0.85 J/M which would make it one of the most efficient Ethereum miners available. While the ASIC appears to offer significant advantages it is unlikely to meet the global demand for global Ethereum miners and is unlikely to affect global GPU shortages. Bitmain did not announce specific pricing or availability information for the Antminer E9 ASIC.