Galaxy GeForce RTX 3080 Ti And RTX 3070 LHR Latest To Nerf Ethereum Mining

Cryptocurrency mining seems to be just one factor behind the shortage of graphics cards on the market today, and many gamers have rejoiced at anything that might make cards more accessible. Limiting mining on consumer cards is a big deal for manufacturers, too, since they want to sell their own specialized CMP lineups of mining cards. NVIDIA, the maker of GPUs like the CMP 30HX, wants to protect its own bottom line, too. In short, everyone has their own angles, but many parties are in full agreement that limiting mining on consumer graphics cards can go a long way to shifting the balance back to gamers. Now, the first wave of crypto-gimped high-end hardware is on the way. 

GALAX doesn't have nearly the presence in the North American market that it does elsewhere, but it's pretty huge in those other markets. The company has announced that the GeForce RTX 3070 Black General and GeForce RTX 3080 Black General OC are hot off the assembly line. NVIDIA has previously confirmed that we'd start to see GeForce graphics cards with hash rate limiters in mid-May. It seems that these GALAX models are those cards, as they include hash rate limiters and the effects are pretty dramatic.


We brought our translator over to GALAX's website to get a look at the specs for these cards. According to GALAX's listing for the GeForce RTX 3080 Black General OC, the hash rate has been slashed down to around 43 MH/s. That's around half of what an non-limited GeForce RTX 3080 cards can pump out, which should make these cards much less attractive to miners. The same can be said for the GeForce RTX 3070 Black General, as the page for that card says it will be limited to just 25 MH/s. Again, that's half the rate of previous RTX 3070 cards. 

Otherwise, these cards seem to be standards models of the GeForce RTX 3070 and 3080. The 3080 Black General OC has 10 GB of 14 GT/s GDDR6X memory on a 320-bit memory bus and the usual 8,704 CUDA cores. The maximum boost clock is 1.74 GHz, which isn't too shabby, either. Meanwhile, the 3070 Black General has the same 8 GB of GDDR6 and 5,888 CUDA cores we've come to know and love, and its GPU maxes out at 1.725 GHz. 

We're sure the fight over cryptomining limiters has just begun. Previously, NVIDIA introduced and subsequently botched a limiter on its GeForce RTX 3060 cards. That model is also due to get this improved version of the hash rate limiter, so later cards will hopefully be less useful for crypto than the first batch of cards. Now that the company has confirmed and apparently started shipping its GAxx02 family of GPUs to its board partners, it's possible that the tide is turning.