Crypto Miners Fool Nvidia's Anti-Mining Limiter With $6 HDMI Dummy Plug

[Lightwreather]

Summary

Sometimes the toughest problems have the easiest solutions. Nvidia might claim that its hash limiter on the GeForce RTX 3060 is unhackable, but that doesn't mean that a workaround doesn't exist. Cryptocurrency miners have seemingly found the solution to the limiter, and it only costs $5.99.

 

Quotes

Quote

Although Nvidia put an anti-mining algorithm in place to nerf the GeForce RTX 3060's hash rate in Ethereum, the mechanism didn't last very long. As odd as it may sound, Nvidia gave away the keys to its own kingdom when the chipmaker accidentally released a GeForce beta driver that disabled the limiter.

However, the beta driver doesn't completely unlock Ethereum mining as there are still some restrictions present. For starters, the driver supposedly limits the mining activities to one GeForce RTX 3060. It does this by requiring the graphics card needed to communicate with the motherboard through a PCIe 3.0 x8 interface as a minimum, meaning PCIe x1 risers are useless. Furthermore, a monitor has to be connected to the GeForce RTX 3060 via the HDMI port or DisplayPort output.

he second requisite seems expensive since you'd need to connect a monitor to each GeForce RTX 3060. However, Nvidia's driver isn't as smart as the chipmaker makes it out to be — The driver detects if a monitor is connected to the graphics card, but it can't tell the difference if it's a real display or not. Therefore, an HDMI dummy plug, which retails for as low as $5.99 on Amazon, easily tricks Nvidia's driver into thinking that a display is effectively present when in reality, it isn't.A user from Quasar Zone has proven that the workaround is functional with his four-way GeForce RTX 3060 setup. Each graphics card put up a hash rate of around 48 MH/s to contribute to the total average of 192 MH/s. It doesn't even require a modern platform to work. The user's modest testbed revolved around a dual-core Intel Pentium G3220 processor from the long-gone Haswell days and a Gigabyte G1.Sniper 5 motherboard. The user also confirmed that his setup works on the Maximus VI Extreme as well. The two motherboards share the same attribute of having four PCIe 3.0 x16 expansion slots, ideal for housing the user's four GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards.

Nvidia's hash limiter is but a small rock in cryptocurrency miners' path. Since a workaround is plausible, it's just a matter of time before someone perfects it to circumvent the anti-mining mechanism completely.

 

My thoughts

This is Hilarious. First nvidia unlocks the driver and now we find this. The old adage of "where there is a will, there is a way", certainly seems true, anouncing something as "unhackable", is bound to get it hacked or circumvented in some way. imo, if nvidia had silently added the mining limiter, it might have worked, instead they had to pull off a PR stunt and well, yea.

But anyway, if you have a bunch of 3060s lying about, I hate you first of all. But if are gonna be mining with the 3060, well, now you know there are ways to unlock its full potential.

Sources

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/cryptominers-fool-nvidia-anti-mining-limited-hdmi-dummy-plug

[ARikozuM]

I can't believe this is all it took... So sad. 

Spoiler

Alexa, play Despacito. 

 

[Jurrunio]

Why cant it be this easy to break their power and voltage limits, dang.

[leadeater]

2 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

Why cant it be this easy to break their power and voltage limits, dang.

Damn so true, so much locked away potential.

[linuxChips2600]

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Damn so true, so much locked away potential.

buh mah warrante tho

[Jurrunio]

Just now, linuxChips2600 said:

buh mah warrante tho

The miners still get warranty, another thing to be envy of

[Moonzy]

HDMI dummy plugs are gonna get scalped now

Or they already are

[Icarus_Radio]

Just one question, which platform is he using and how can he manages to provide x8 bandwidth for each card?

Intel platform may have a lot of lanes from the chipset, but very little motherboards support at least 2 x8 lane right?

 

EDIT:

Take a look at the motherboard manual, it is Z87 chipset and uses two switches.

[Moonzy]

3 minutes ago, Icarus_Radio said:

Just one question, which platform is he using and how can he manages to provide x8 bandwidth for each card?

Intel platform may have a lot of lanes from the chipset, but very little motherboards support at least 2 x8 lane right?

 

1 hour ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

The user's modest testbed revolved around a dual-core Intel Pentium G3220 processor from the long-gone Haswell days and a Gigabyte G1.Sniper 5 motherboard. The user also confirmed that his setup works on the Maximus VI Extreme as well. The two motherboards share the same attribute of having four PCIe 3.0 x16 expansion slots, ideal for housing the user's four GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards.

Yeah I don't think many people have extreme boards with 4x 8x lanes lol

 

But hey, if it's earning money, I can see people spending extra on a board just for this

 

Maybe Nvidia should just give up and not limit anything at all I'd love to have a 3080ti

[leadeater]

8 minutes ago, Icarus_Radio said:

Just one question, which platform is he using and how can he manages to provide x8 bandwidth for each card?

PCIe PLX chip. They are used to provide more electrical PCIe lanes while sharing PCIe connectivity back to the CPU. Exactly the same way the chipset on Ryzen works, the chipset provides a bunch of PCIe lanes but there is only a PCIe 4.0 x4 link between the chipset and the CPU.

 

Some motherboard models come with PLX chips on them, rare but they exist.

[GamerDude]

Why is anyone at all surprised that nVidia's 'ffolproof' block is easily broken is beyond me. We all knew that the nVidia driver block was just PR anyway, and that sooner of later, multiple workarounds would be available.

[Ankh Tech]

Rge problem is, the retailers don't care, the microcenter of middle east literally sells mining rigs with 6 3090 for 18000 dollars, this could all be solved if they shut off online shopping for more than one card

[staticpage]

21 minutes ago, leadeater said:

PCIe PLX chip. They are used to provide more electrical PCIe lanes while sharing PCIe connectivity back to the CPU. Exactly the same way the chipset on Ryzen works, the chipset provides a bunch of PCIe lanes but there is only a PCIe 4.0 x4 link between the chipset and the CPU.

 

Some motherboard models come with PLX chips on them, rare but they exist.

Also the GTX 690 had a PLX chip. Same ones on these mobos, to make Two GPUs one via sli on the same card.

[Beerzerker]

3 hours ago, Jurrunio said:

Why cant it be this easy to break their power and voltage limits, dang.

Just publicly make the claim the power limits set in place are "Unhackable"......
Someone will get around to it shortly.

On a side note:
Can't wait to see how high the scalpers will price HDMI dummy plugs.

[Ankh Tech]

3 minutes ago, Beerzerker said:

On a side note:
Can't wait to see how high the scalpers will price HDMI dummy plugs.

dummy hdmi plugs for sale,  only for 100 dollars, buy 2 for 150!!!

[Arika]

9 minutes ago, Beerzerker said:

Just publicly make the claim the power limits set in place are "Unhackable"......
Someone will get around to it shortly.

undervolting CPUs is unhackable!!!

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, Arika S said:

undervolting CPUs is unhackable!!!

GPU stock is unhackable!!

 

Spoiler

Please work

 

[Oshino Shinobu]

This is exactly what I was thinking of when they were discussing it on the WAN show. I have one in my server as it doesn't like booting headless.

[Red :)]

this was very anti-spanish inquisition to be this breakable

[small guy64]

I recall having to make something like this years ago for F@H, but it was a DVI dummy plug.

[King of Memes]

18 hours ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

Summary

Sometimes the toughest problems have the easiest solutions. Nvidia might claim that its hash limiter on the GeForce RTX 3060 is unhackable, but that doesn't mean that a workaround doesn't exist. Cryptocurrency miners have seemingly found the solution to the limiter, and it only costs $5.99.

 

Quotes

 

My thoughts

This is Hilarious. First nvidia unlocks the driver and now we find this. The old adage of "where there is a will, there is a way", certainly seems true, anouncing something as "unhackable", is bound to get it hacked or circumvented in some way. imo, if nvidia had silently added the mining limiter, it might have worked, instead they had to pull off a PR stunt and well, yea.

But anyway, if you have a bunch of 3060s lying about, I hate you first of all. But if are gonna be mining with the 3060, well, now you know there are ways to unlock its full potential.

Sources

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/cryptominers-fool-nvidia-anti-mining-limited-hdmi-dummy-plug

i hate cryptocard currency mining, its just contributing to the gpu issues. I wish this workarround didnt exist.

[AldiPrayogi]

Who would win?

 

A multi-billion dollar company, or

 

a $6 dongle?

[Dillpickle23422]

New idea to combat gpu scalpers: buy all the dummy plugs. I see no problems at all with that xD

[StDragon]

Kind of reminds me of the Mouse Jiggler. It's a basic HID input device that jiggles the mouse cursor to prevent RDS / Citrix from timing out due to inactivity. I remember someone in an IT department was at his wits' ends trying to figure out why sessions weren't logging off at night to free up concurrent licensed seats. He eventually found out at work that news of these broke loose in a sales department and everyone had installed that device. Needless to say, he drafted a ban on these and the IT director agreed and signed off on them.

 

 

[Rauten]

This is... this is just pathetic.

I think we all expected nVidia's "unhackable" solution to be broken, but I don't think anyone expected the workaround to be this goddamn ridiculous.

 

What I'm the most of afraid of is that nVidia will likely counter this with a driver update and, again, just like what happened with the dev driver, only gamers will suffer the consequences while miners will just be able to stay on the current driver version forever without a care in the world.