Nvidia Said We Couldn't Game On This Crypto Mining Card...
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it as precedent for repurposing mining-only GPUs for graphics, in threads about Nvidia limiting mining on gaming cards.
What it is
Linus Tech Tips tests a Chinese mining-only Nvidia card, hacked with a modified driver so it can render games and output video through an integrated GPU.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2020 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Cites colejohnson66 · 2020-10 · on “AMD Reveals the Radeon RX 6000 Series, Coming November 18th”
Nvidia as well made “crypto mining” cards that were just a mainline card without video output. I recall a video by LinusTechTips who attempted to get video output from one of them. Edit: Here’s the video: [this video]
Cites arsome · 2021-02 · on “Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half”
Sounds like it's time to crack some NVIDIA drivers. I already do it for the video encoding limitations, why not this too? Miners are willing to go to some really hacky extremes, reflashing firmwares, custom fan mods, extreme overclock configurations, etc to maximize hashrates and certainly won't care if they have to jump through some hoops to patch a specific version of the Linux driver or enable unsigned drivers on Windows, as long as they make more profit. Good luck with this one NVIDIA but you're playing a losing game. As soon as one un-restricted version of the driver exists, this is as good as useless and demand will be the same as ever for these cards unless they're able to ship CMP ca
Cites ILikeBikes · 2021-02 · on “Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half”
I do hate miners But I'm concerned that a company can tell you what you can or can't do with your hardware. Where is the spirit behind the hacker community, Jailbreaking iPhones, the right to repair, the ban of tattoos that prevented the use of Linux on PCs,... That's a very concerning move from me. Also, for a company that does morale : (1) Nvidia's marketing is one of the best for making old products look obsolete and replaceable. Most gamers would do great with their old gen card, they just don't need to upgrade already. But they reserve cards for them so that they can create as much e-waste as they want (2) they could just have prevented supply issues if their supply chains were diverse
Cites PartiallyTyped · 2021-02 · on “Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate”
It can be. NVDA's stance is utter bull. It is entirely possible to render video games and stream them to another display [1,2] [1] [this video] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]
Cites solarkraft · 2021-02 · on “Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate”
While officially impossible, theoretically it should be work, in the same way as laptop GPUs (the dedicated GPU gives the rendered image back to the integrated GPU for seamless switching instead of outputing it directly). It has been tried 2 years ago on LinusTechTips: [this video] TL;DW: Very weird and extremely unofficial, but it can be done. These might still be some cheap rendering cards on Linux when they're used up.
Cites tvb12 · 2021-02 · on “The GPU Sadness Index: Tracking eBay Pricing”
There's a sliver of hope that the mining cards will be reusable as general purpose gpus by having the card stream its output to an integrated gpu. I first heard about using the p106-p90 cards on Windows with a modified driver via a LTT video [1]. I later read a blog post where someone claimed that the card was plug-and-play on Pop!_OS (a Linux distro) [2]. I think this is fairly well known at this point. I would be very curious to see how many were actually reused, though. I remember seeing a listing for a large number of p100 cards a few months ago, but I don't see any listings now. Were they scooped up and reused, or did the sellers give up and trash them? [1] [this video] [2] [LINK] (search fo
Cites eins1234 · 2021-03 · on “GeForce RTX 3060 Ethereum Mining Restrictions Have Been Broken”
For those looking for details, I remember watching a Linus Tech Tips video on it a while ago. Just managed to dig it up: [this video] Forum thread has more: [LINK]
Cites mikepurvis · 2021-05 · on “Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards”
There is some precedent for hacking ex-miner cards to route the video signal back to a motherboard output over the PCI bus: [this video] With so many more of them out there, it'll be interesting to see if this becomes more of a thing. Alternatively, it's easy to imagine that depending on just how constrained these are, they might eventually find homes doing non-crypto headless DC workloads, such as deep learning stuff.