Nvidia's RTX 3060 will mine crypto at half speed, may be easier to buy

With new graphics cards unavailable for purchase at their list price months after launch, gamers are unsurprisingly a bit touchy about just where all of AMD and Nvidia's new GPUs are ending up. Nvidia partner Zotac suffered backlash yesterday after posting an image of their graphics cards with the caption "an army of GPUs hungry for coin", implying they were destined for cryptocurrency miners rather than gamers. It's perhaps with this kind of attitude in mind that Nvidia has made a big announcement regarding their upcoming RTX 3060 graphics cards.

So here's the rub: the RTX 3060's performance will be artificially limited when performing cryptocurrency mining, with Nvidia stating that the card will limit its hash rate by approximately 50 per cent. That should make the RTX 3060 far less efficient at mining and a much poorer value for miners, thereby reducing a stiff source of competition that ordinary consumers face for each graphics card sold.

Instead, miners are being encouraged to buy new speciality mining cards that Nvidia is also announcing today, which won't face the restriction. The new range is called 'CMP', which stands for 'Cryptocurrency Mining Processors', with cards to be available from Nvidia and its partners - including Asus, Colorful, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI and Palit.

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