Nvidia Limited Hash Rate (LHR)

Would also like to know this. Dell needs to answer this asap.

Well it should be a pretty easy answer. Someone at Dell has surely been given the information from Nvidia.

I don't think it will be an easy answer.  Everything Nvidia is putting out on the issue makes it seem like the LHR series won't be easy to identify.  Alienware devices aren't exactly where the crypto miners are going to get these cards in bulk.  I understand the market will eventually be saturated with LHR cards.  The more I think about what makes sense is the re-sellers who are putting these cards out on a massive scale are likely to get the first round of LHR products.  Be interesting to see what the performance impacts are under normal non-mining use.

@Vanadiel Thanks for the context and putting better words to my initial message.  As a wannabe Pentester I am curious if the LHR GPU performance will also impact hash cracking applications such as HASHCAT?

Cards with limited hash rates will be marked with a "Lite Hash Rate" or "LHR" identifier. NVIDIA continues its push to get GeForce GPUs into the hands of gamers rather than crypto miners. The company announced in a blog post that it will halve the hash rate of newly-manufactured GeForce RTX 3080, RTX 3070, and RTX 3060 Ti graphics cards.

This is not something that DELL is doing. Its NVIDIA with the drivers and VBIOS to discourage coin miners.

That I do not know. I am assuming it will impact any type of application that use the hardware to perform certain hash calculations.

My understanding is it is baked into the silicon and not just the driver, so it will be a lot harder to bypass than the previous attempt to limit the hash rate.

Nvidia is not giving out much detail about how it exactly works or performs, to avoid bypass attempts.

Wish I could tell you more, but I think it will be an error and trial thing. Normally the LHR logo is displayed on the retail box so when you purchase a video card you know it is LHR. Since these are OEM cards and do not come with a box, I am not sure how or if it would be advertised.

I am thinking, since there are prebuild machines designed for gaming, Nvidia might supply them with regular GPU chips rather than LHR versions, since these systems should mostly make their way into gamers hands and not be all mass purchased by miners.

That is just me thinking out loud, but I think it would make sense and be good for the Alienware brand to be able to advertise their gaming systems as "LHR free" or something along those lines.

"Cards with limited hash rates will be marked with a "Lite Hash Rate" or "LHR" identifier."

That's referring to marketing and packaging of retail GPUs.  These are OEM models in the alienware lineup.  It's still not clear that anyone who buys a prebuilt like the Aurora will be able to know which version is included at the time of purchase . 

Mining Youtuber Brandon Coin found a way to bypass the Dagger-Hashimoto mining algorithm performance lock on the RTX 3060. He achieved this by using Nvidia's very own developer drivers (version 470.05). The card hits around 50MH/s with the perf unlocked. The card's memory is overclocked but this is still a huge leap from the 20-25MH/s limit.

The standard Driver looks at the card.  If its not a headless card the End user driver will lock down the hash rate.

There were tons of users who downloaded the other driver.

So the unhackable hash lock has already been broken.

Which is sort of amusing just like the secure boot golden keys were accidentally released. . The latest RTX 3080 churns out about  90 Mh/s at 220W unlocked.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3106726/golden-keys-that-unlock-windows-secure-boot-protection-uncovered.html

Its really lazy software fix to think that the people who want to use for mining wouldn't figure it out.  They want to charge more for "mining cards" and don't want them to be re sold as video cards later on.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/?ncid=afm-chs-44270&ranMID=44270

“This reduced hash rate 25 Mh/s only applies to newly manufactured cards with the LHR identifier and not to cards already purchased,”

The LHR is a new version of the hash lock, and is part of the Silicon as opposed to a software based lock.

Since it's part of the Silicon it will be a lot harder if not impossible to defeat, pending on how they added it to the Silicon.

They could go as far as using one or more pins on the processor to disable/enable the protection at a hardware level. This would be similar to how intel locks down CPU's for overclocking.

I called them up. A guy on the technical team said ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about and no one else will either’. Cheers dell. 

They did it. All customers who purchased a card before the LHR was listed on the datasheet will have products without LHR.

It will really depend on what silicon they have in stock at MSI. MSI is the OEM for the DELL RTX cards. Once they are out of non - LHR Silicon that will be it. Unless Nvidia is still making the regular silicon for OEM's, or there's some other deal in place.