What are LHR video cards?

LHR stands for Little Hash Rate. This is a driver update by NVIDIA that was released in May, to ensure crypto miners don't profit from the powerful video cards as much. The NVIDIA RTX 3000 series was launched in September 2020, but Ethereum miners also really liked it, for example. As a result, the cards weren't as available for gamers. With this update, NVIDIA makes it harder for crypto miners and gamers have a better chance at getting a powerful video card.

The high hash rate is what makes the NVIDIA RTX 3000 series interesting to crypto miners. These miners use the video cards in a mining rack that bring in crypto currencies. The processing power/hash rate of the new video cards allowed miners to make a lot of money, which is why NVIDIA implemented this update. In addition, gamers often had a poor chance of getting an RTX 3000 GPU because miners but most of them. With this update, NVIDIA hopes that the video cards only end up in the hands of gamers.

A lower processing power doesn't always mean less performance. Luckily, this also isn't the case for gaming. The hash rate only affects the crypto mining performance. The clock speed, number of CUDA cores, RAM, and ray tracing technology all remain the same. So an NVIDIA RTX 3090 still reaches a high number of frames per second in 4K. The update was only created to stop crypto mining with new GPUs.

You can't tell if a video card has a lite hash rate by looking at it. All NVIDIA video cards that were released in May have received a different product code. The RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070 Ti, and RTX 3080 Ti GPUs all have a lite hash rate. LHR isn't indicated on the packaging of the video card, but you can find it with the code. The product code of a non-LHR video card would be GA102-200-A1, and that of a video card with LHR would be GA102-202-A1, for example.