NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 seems to have BIOS measures against crypto mining

Earlier today, NVIDIA had two cryptocurrency announcements. The GPU designer said it would limit the mining hash rate of its upcoming GeForce RTX 3060 and it also introduced a new line of CMPs (Cryptocurrency Mining Processors). Even though the GeForce RTX 3060 is embargoed until February 25th, it appears some distributors are already selling stock to miners.

VideoCardz came across a video of CryptoLeo. This guy managed to buy the ZOTAC RTX 3060 Twin Edge OC for close to $800. It seems it's a bad week for Zotac -- earlier this week the firm already hit the news after it endorsed cryptocurrency mining on its Twitter account.

CryptoLeo claims the place where he got his RTX 3060 has already sold all available cards at elevated prices. The video shows some cryptocurrency mining and it backs up NVIDIA's claims. The RTX 3060 starts mining at 41.5MH/s but after about two minutes of mining, the card's performance drops to 24-26MH/s.

VideoCardz notes it seems NVIDIA's anti-mining algorithm is not part of the driver but an algorithmic implementation in the video card's BIOS:

Just a minute or two after starting, the hash rate has dropped from 41.5 MH/s to 26-24 MH/s. Since the author of the video has no drivers for this card, this would suggest that the anti-mining algorithm is not present in the software, but rather implemented in the BIOS itself.