The new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 video cards are here and we managed to buy one quickly while there was some stock left to do some mining benchmarks and tests. We already know that mining performance for the RTX 3060 is limited for Ethereum, but what else can you mine with the full performance is something that we also wanted to find out for sure. As we have predicted availability and pricing of the RTX 3060 is off the charts as people expected these GPUs to be the sweet spot for mining Ethereum – high hashrate and low price. Neither of these did turn out to be true however and stock availability is low, so buying even just one of these new GPUs was pretty hard and we had to pre-order it and buy it bundled with a motherboard just to get our hands on it for testing.

Specifications wise – nothing unexpected. We already knew what to expect from the RTX 3060 GPUs in terms of hardware and GPU and VRAM specs. We also though we knew what to expect from them in terms of performance, but then Nvidia suddenly surprised us with their plans a couple of days ago. And although they are saying that they want to have the RTX 3060 available for gamers, what they are meaning is that they want to sell their new Nvidia CMP HX Dedicated Crypto Mining GPUs to miners instead of RTX 3060. In the end they will probably not succeed very well with either for a number of reasons…

When we run Phoenixminer on the ASUS RTX 3060 GPU with 70% TDP and +1000 MHz video memory in MSI Afterburner we are getting almost 46 MH/s hashrate for Ethereum, however the protective mechanism quickly kicks in and drops that to about 23-24 MH/s. Mining Ehtereum with 46 MH/s at just about 120W of power usage is probably some miner’s wet dream for a mining GPU, but unfortunately that is not going to happen at least for the moment. And it is not only affecting Ethereum mining, Ethereum Classic also gets the half hashrate reduction (it is very similar in terms of algorithm), even Vertcoin’s VertHash algorithm is affected and possibly other memory-intensive algorithms as well.

Affected Algorithms Performance:
– Ethereum – Ethash algorithm – 45 -> 23 MH/s
– VertCoin – Verthash algorithm – 850 -> 370 KH/s
– Ethereum Classic – Etchash algorithm – 47 -> 25 MH/s

All is not lost however as there are some profitable crypto algorithms that are not affected by the forced half hashrate for mining from Nvidia, so the RTX 3060 is still usable and performing quite well in some other popular algorithms…

Unaffected Algorithms Performance:
– Ravencoin – KAWPOW algorithm – 22 MH/s
– Veil – ProgPoW algorithm – 20.8 MH/s
– BitCash – X25X algorithm – 4.2 MH/s
– Conflux – Octopus algorithm – 42 MH/s
– Beam – BeamHashIII algorithm – 22.5 MH/s
– Aeternity – CuckooCycle algorithm – 6.6 G/s
– Grin – Cuckatoo32 algorithm – 0.39 G/s
– ZEL – Zelhash algorithm – 33.6 Sol/s
– Firo (XZC) – MTP algorithm – 2.4 MH/s

So, while the RTX 3060 may not be the best option for Ethereum mining, it can still perform quite well in some other mining algorithms, so not a total waste of money as far as crypto mining is concerned. If you are only focusing on Ethereum mining however, then you might want to think twice and leave the RTX 3060 to other miners or gamers instead.

– What performance other Nvidia RTX 30 Series GPU deliver for Ethereum…

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