Cryptocurrency mining seems to be just one factor in the lack of graphics cards in the market today, and many gamers have been excited about anything that could make cards easier to access. Limiting mining to consumer cards is also a big deal for manufacturers as they want to sell their own specialized CMP ranges of mining cards. NVIDIA, maker of GPUs like the CMP 30HX, also wants to protect its own bottom line. In short, everyone has their own point of view, but many parties agree that restricting mining to consumer graphics cards can go a long way in shifting the balance onto gamers. Now the first wave of high-end crypto-gimped hardware is on the way.
GALAX isn’t nearly as present in the North American market as it is elsewhere, but it’s pretty big in those other markets. The company has announced that the GeForce RTX 3070 Black General and GeForce RTX 3080 Black General OC will roll off the assembly line. NVIDIA has already confirmed that we will see GeForce graphics cards with hash rate limiters starting in mid-May. It seems that these GALAX models are these cards because they contain hash rate limiters and the effects are pretty dramatic.
We took our translator to the GALAX website to look at the technical specifications for these cards. According to the GALAX listing for the GeForce RTX 3080 Black General OC, the hash rate has been reduced to around 43 MH / s. That’s roughly half what an unlimited GeForce RTX 3080 card can pump out, which should make these cards less attractive to miners. The same goes for the GeForce RTX 3070 Black General, as the page for this card states that it will be limited to only 25 MH / s. Again, this is half the rate of previous RTX 3070 cards.
Otherwise, these cards appear to be standard GeForce RTX 3070 and 3080 models. The 3080 Black General OC has 10 GB of GDDR6X memory with 14 GT / s 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 GDDR6 and 5,888 CUDA cores that we have come to know and love, and the maximum GPU is 1.725 GHz.
We are sure that the battle for cryptomining limiters has only just begun. NVIDIA had previously introduced a limiter for its GeForce RTX 3060 cards and then botched it. This model is also intended to receive this improved version of the hash rate limiter, so that later cards will hopefully be less useful for crypto than the first deck of cards. Now that the company confirms its GAxx02 family of GPUs and appears to have shipped them to its board partners, the tide is likely to turn.
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