Best GeForce RTX 3060 LHR Overclock Settings for Mining Ethereum

Thanks to its 3,584 CUDA cores and 12GB of VRAM, the GeForce RTX 3060 is a graphics card that has brought next-gen shading and ray-tracing performance to masses. But besides being great for high FPS gaming at 1080p or 1440p resolution, this card is also well-suited for mining cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum (ETH) or other coins like Ravencoin (RVN) and ERGO (ERG).

Read also: Best GeForce RTX 3060 Ti LHR Overclock Settings for Mining Ethereum

Unfortunately, most GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards come with a built-in crypto mining limiter which nerfs the card’s performance while mining Ethereum. However, the built-in limiter only affects Ethereum mining performance, which means you can mine other cryptocurrency coins without any issues.

As of May 7th 2022 all LHR cards can now be fully unlocked! If you plan to mine Ethereum with the RTX 3060 LHR we strongly recommend using the latest version of NBMiner or NiceHash QuickMiner. These miners fully bypass the card’s built-in mining limiter, thus allowing the card to achieve its maximum mining speed.

If you own a first generation RTX 3060 card that has a GA106-300 chip, then you can easily bypass the built-in limiter by simply installing the 470.05 driver which unlocks the card for mining Ethereum. This will allow you to mine Ethereum at hashrate of 45-50 MH/s. However, if you own a second generation RTX 3060 (LHR) that has a GA106-302 chip, then you’ll have to settle with a 21-23 MH/s mining hashrate. But with a few tweaks and proper mining software, you can push your card up to 47 MH/s mark. To find out how to squeeze the maximum performance out of your GeForce RTX 3060 card, keep reading further.

Best Overclock Settings for Mining Ethereum with GeForce RTX 3060

Before you attempt to mine Ethereum with you GeForce RTX 3060, we strongly recommend overclocking the card in order to achieve the highest possible hashrate, and lower the card’s power consumption as much as possible. The settings we are about to show you can be applied both to the first generation RTX 3060 cards, as well as to the second generation RTX 3060 (LHR) cards.

Of course, use overclocking at your own risk! This will void the warranty of your graphics card, and may even destroy it, or damage its components. ViCadia.com does not take any responsibilities related to overclocking or performing any adjustments to your computer. You have been warned!

--lock-cclock 1250 --mclock 1300

If you followed our instructions correctly, your settings in MSI Afterbuner should look something like this:

Ethereum Mining Performance & Benchmarks

For purposes of this overclocking guide, we’ve used our EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC Gaming graphics card. In order to benchmark our card’s Ethereum mining performance, we’ve used four different miners: NBMiner v41.0, NiceHash QuickMiner v0.5.4.0 RC, GMiner v2.91, and T-Rex v0.25.9. All tests were performed with applied overclock settings (with one exception), and on PC running Windows 10 with NVIDIA’s 512.59 graphics drivers. Fan speed, GPU core temperature, and total board power draw were recorded with GPU-Z v2.46. Here you can see our benchmark results:

The NBMiner 41.0 is a clear winner here. Thanks to its ability to fully bypass the card’s built-in LHR limiter, and the fact that you can apply custom clocks while running it, our RTX 3060 was able to deliver 47.5 MH/s on average, which was simply an incredible result. Second place took NiceHash QuickMiner, which is the first miner to fully unlock LHR cards, however, we didn’t find it very much useful, since it proved to be very unstable, and we had to run it with stock clocks since applying custom clocks turned out to be quite complicated.

Speaking of other miners, there isn’t much to say about them given the fact that many of them still don’t feature full LHR unlocks. In case of T-Rex 0.25.9 miner, we detected a slight regression in performance compared to the version 0.24.8, since the older version of the miner was able to deliver 35.5 MH/s on average. Unfortunately we can’t really determine whether this performance regression is caused by the new NVIDIA display driver or by software updates, but if you want to achieve better hashrate with this miner, just stick with the version 0.24.8. Down below we’ve also plotted a chart that more clearly illustrates the performance difference between different Ethereum miners.

Efficiency-wise, here the NBMiner 41.0 obliterated all competition. Being able to deliver almost 432 kH per watt, this was by far the most efficient miner among all we tested. Surprisingly, QuickMiner turned out to be a very poor miner when it came to efficiency. Although it features full LHR unlock, its inability to apply custom clocks resulted in extremely high power consumption (150 W), and thus very poor efficiency rating. This allowed T-Rex miner to take the second spot since it was able to deliver 350.64 kH per watt (in dual mining mode). The T-Rex miner also performed pretty good in single mining mode. While looking at these results, we also noticed that the GMiner 2.91 performed significantly better compared to the last version we tested (2.74), since the new one was able to deliver an extra 0.5 MH/s on average.

We’ve also tested dual mining modes of GMiner 2.91 and T-Rex 0.25.9 which allow users to simultaneously mine both Ethereum and other cryptocurrency coins. For purposes of this guide, we’ve tested only GMiner’s ETH + TON dual mining mode, and T-Rex’s ETH + ERGO dual mining mode. As you can see from our screenshot above, the dual mining mode is a real thing and it works pretty well, however, its raw Ethereum mining performance is far from desirable. This applies both to GMiner and T-Rex miner.

You see, to mine two cryptocurrencies at the same time, the miner has to run with custom overclock settings in order to avoid triggering the LHR limiter. Unfortunately, this limits the maximum ETH mining hashrate to around 27 MH/s (at least in the case of T-Rex miner in ETH+ALPH mode). However, mining Ethereum simultaneously with different coins doesn’t always result with the same poor hashrate.

For example, GMiner was able to deliver full 34 MH/s while mining ETH with TON, which makes it much more efficient and profitable than T-Rex miner. The only difference between T-Rex miner and GMiner miner is that the T-Rex miner doesn’t support ETH+TON dual mining, while GMiner does. Also, T-Rex miner seems to be more energy-efficient, while GMiner tends to consume a lot of power, especially if run RTX 3060 at stock settings (see our chart above). If you decide to mine both ETH and TON with GMiner, then we recommend applying our overclock settings. This will significantly reduce TON mining hashrate (95 vs. 504. MH/s), but will keep your card cool, and will keep your electricity bills in check.

Conclusion

After more than a year of waiting, we now finally have miners that fully unlock LHR cards. This is fantastic news, and we want to congratulate developers of NiceHash QuickMiner and NBMiner for achieving the impossible. Unfortunately, this all seems to be a little too late, given how Ethereum has become difficult to mine, and how prices of electricity (and other sources of energy) sky-rocketed due to global geopolitical circumstances.

We hope you found our GeForce RTX 3060 mining guide helpful. With these tips and tricks you can now finally turn your GeForce RTX 3060 LHR into a serious mining graphics card. We’ll continue updating this guide with new information and data, so be sure to check this page once in a while for new updates.

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