News Crypto Miners Fool Nvidia's Anti-Mining Limiter With $6 HDMI Dummy Plug

[Admin]

Crypto miners find a workaround to Nvidia's anti-mining limiter on the GeForce RTX 3060.

Crypto Miners Fool Nvidia's Anti-Mining Limiter With $6 HDMI Dummy Plug : Read more

 

[hotaru.hino]

So NVIDIA's solution was "detect if GPU is trying to run something without a display"?

Yikes.

 

[LolaGT]

<insert 'we are laughing' Anchorman gif here>

Why this strikes me as hilarious is because nvidia had to know, it was just placating the anti-miner crowd who they likely see as silly anyway.

 

[sstanic]

"As odd as it may sound, Nvidia gave away the keys to its own kingdom when the chipmaker accidentally released a GeForce beta driver that disabled the limiter. " As odd as it may sound? Accidentally?

Why so rude towards us readers? We weren't born yesterday. What, they did it exactly so, by accident?

 

[spongiemaster]

So NVIDIA's solution was "detect if GPU is trying to run something without a display"?

Yikes.

No, this only checks the box that's detecting if a display is connected and wouldn't remove the limiter by itself. You still need the beta bios and to pass the other checks, but as this article points out, once you have the beta driver, everything else is easily bypassed.

 

[vanadiel007]

Makes you wonder how secure their drivers etc are, if they cannot even figure this out and at least make it look half decent.

 

[cryoburner]

Therefore, an HDMI dummy plug, which retails for as low as $5.99 on Amazon, easily tricks Nvidia's driver into thinking that a display is effectively present when in reality, it isn't.

I know this site is trying to push its own Amazon sponsor links, but they are also available for as little as $2 shipped direct from China on eBay, and the big mining operations will likely be able to get them in bulk for even less.

 

[lazyabum]

HDMI Dummy Plug,Headless Ghost, Display Emulator （Fit Headless-1920x1080 New Generation@60Hz）Amazon'sChoice
I came across these things by chance searching for HDMI cables on Amazon and had this link on my browser tab for a month. The comments rarely hinted rarely hinted at a use for bypassing GPU mining protocols. Now that I looked recently, seems this method is really taking hold among miners though I doubt they're that effective the simplest solutions are the first that go down.

 

[InvalidError]

seems this method is really taking hold among miners though I doubt they're that effective the simplest solutions are the first that go down.

There is nothing that Nvidia can do about the drivers and GPUs that are already in production since all that crypto-miners need to do is keep using the same old drivers and vBIOS. All Nvidia can do is break hardware compatibility with old drivers and vBIOS by launching new models.

 

[digitalgriffin]

No, this only checks the box that's detecting if a display is connected and wouldn't remove the limiter by itself. You still need the beta bios and to pass the other checks, but as this article points out, once you have the beta driver, everything else is easily bypassed.

The beta driver will only a work a short while to. Cards coming out of the factory soon will not work with beta driver. I can bet you that.

 

[jkflipflop98]

There has to be a clear solution in hardware to have a chance at this. Software is not going to cut it. Two distinct lines of parts going out the door.
They should be making ASICs for mining that blow the doors off a GPU. It's like, the first rule of business. Hey, you see all these people want a thing? Sell them that thing. It's not that F'n difficult a concept to understand. We've been in this stupid Crypto fad for years now and no one has responded to this massive demand in the market. Design and fabricate a mining ASIC for the masses so we gamers can get back to gaming, please. I just want to use my Index at 144hz ffs. Is that too much to ask?

 

[jonathan1683]

If this is true they didnt really try. When I was mining those HDMI plugs were necessary anyways to get teamviewer working or you would get a black screen. So miners used these before the limitation.

 

[InvalidError]

If this is true they didnt really try. When I was mining those HDMI plugs were necessary anyways to get teamviewer working or you would get a black screen. So miners used these before the limitation.

If all you need is LAN access, you could try SpaceDesk instead.

 

[hotaru.hino]

There has to be a clear solution in hardware to have a chance at this. Software is not going to cut it. Two distinct lines of parts going out the door.
They should be making ASICs for mining that blow the doors off a GPU. It's like, the first rule of business. Hey, you see all these people want a thing? Sell them that thing. It's not that F'n difficult a concept to understand. We've been in this stupid Crypto fad for years now and no one has responded to this massive demand in the market. Design and fabricate a mining ASIC for the masses so we gamers can get back to gaming, please. I just want to use my Index at 144hz ffs. Is that too much to ask?

Why make an ASIC which may cost hundreds of thousands to design, prototype, and fabricate in relatively small numbers compared to GPUs, when you can directly ask the hardware manufacturer of a readily available number cruncher who'll happily sell it to you because a profit is a profit?

 

[cryoburner]

There has to be a clear solution in hardware to have a chance at this. Software is not going to cut it. Two distinct lines of parts going out the door.
They should be making ASICs for mining that blow the doors off a GPU. It's like, the first rule of business. Hey, you see all these people want a thing? Sell them that thing. It's not that F'n difficult a concept to understand. We've been in this stupid Crypto fad for years now and no one has responded to this massive demand in the market. Design and fabricate a mining ASIC for the masses so we gamers can get back to gaming, please. I just want to use my Index at 144hz ffs. Is that too much to ask?

Except the current popular currencies being mined on graphics cards were designed specifically to be ASIC-resistant, to make it harder for specialized devices to significantly outperform standard graphics hardware.

 

[jonathan1683]

If all you need is LAN access, you could try SpaceDesk instead.

Thanks for the info, but I don't mine anymore. Dongle was cheap anyways and worked perfectly.

 

[VforV]

Nvidia is making a fool of those who actually believed they want to limit crypto mining. Some still think they will do it even now...

It's funny how the news few days ago said AMD will not implement anything against mining on their GPUs (like nvidia did ? lol) and tried to spin this as negative somehow: "look, nvidia is caring for gamers, while AMD does not". When in fact RDNA 2 was built to not be very good in mining, but focus on gaming instead, which is why 5700XT has better hashrate than 6700XT, while the latter has about 30% more performance in gaming.

On the contrary nvidia made their Ampere GPUs exceptionally good at mining, better than last gen Turing and much better than RDNA 2.

So who is the lying deciving GPU manufacturer here? Oh, I wonder...

 

[mitch074]

Nvidia is making a fool of those who actually believed they want to limit crypto mining. Some still think they will do it even now...

It's funny how the news few days ago said AMD will not implement anything against mining on their GPUs (like nvidia did ? lol) and tried to spin this as negative somehow: "look, nvidia is caring for gamers, while AMD does not". When in fact RDNA 2 was built to not be very good in mining, but focus on gaming instead, which is why 5700XT has better hashrate than 6700XT, while the latter has about 30% more performance in gaming.

On the contrary nvidia made their Ampere GPUs exceptionally good at mining, better than last gen Turing and much better than RDNA 2.

So who is the lying deciving GPU manufacturer here? Oh, I wonder...

I'm not sure it was deliberate, but it's a nice side-effect of infinity cache : it boosts gaming while allowing for a slower (and cheaper) memory subsystem to be used on all cards. The fact that it nerfs mining (which expects a large frame buffer in direct access) is something that cannot be circumvented, except if you rewrite the algorithm to use something like a a properly sized windowed multistep hashing - but it will still be slower than a fast frame buffer in direct fast access as used by Nvidia.

 

[VforV]

@mitch074
Deliberate or not, it's clear RDNA2 is made especially (could be said even ONLY) for gaming. Ampere GPUs are not only for gaming... actually gaming is almost as a side note, a lower priority for nvidia: AI/server, prosumer, mining and then gaming. That's the order of importance for nvidia, everything else is just PR BS.

 

[InvalidError]

except if you rewrite the algorithm to use something like a a properly sized windowed multistep hashing

The ETH hash order is determined by a PRNG that takes the current node's hash as one of its inputs so the data for the next node hash cannot be loaded before the current node hash has been computed. Because of that, you cannot re-arrange the hash order to make it more cache-friendly.

 

[renz496]

Nvidia is making a fool of those who actually believed they want to limit crypto mining. Some still think they will do it even now...

It's funny how the news few days ago said AMD will not implement anything against mining on their GPUs (like nvidia did ? lol) and tried to spin this as negative somehow: "look, nvidia is caring for gamers, while AMD does not". When in fact RDNA 2 was built to not be very good in mining, but focus on gaming instead, which is why 5700XT has better hashrate than 6700XT, while the latter has about 30% more performance in gaming.

On the contrary nvidia made their Ampere GPUs exceptionally good at mining, better than last gen Turing and much better than RDNA 2.

So who is the lying deciving GPU manufacturer here? Oh, I wonder...

most people know nvidia do it for PR. Do it for gamer? Don't joke about that but for some people they just glad if you can make miner scratching their heads more need to jump through loops and holes just to make things works as it should be. Ultimately nvidia just want to make segmentation for mining market.


Doesn't matter which company are lying. Both are eyeing miner as a cash grab right now. Hence AMD announcing they will make more mining specific cards based on navi 10. Their 7nm capacity already unable to keep up with their current product demand. If they really do it for gamer they should allocate more 7nm capacity towards RDNA 2 manufacturing not make more navi 10 to be sold to miner.

 

[JamesJones44]

There has to be a clear solution in hardware to have a chance at this. Software is not going to cut it. Two distinct lines of parts going out the door.
They should be making ASICs for mining that blow the doors off a GPU. It's like, the first rule of business. Hey, you see all these people want a thing? Sell them that thing. It's not that F'n difficult a concept to understand. We've been in this stupid Crypto fad for years now and no one has responded to this massive demand in the market. Design and fabricate a mining ASIC for the masses so we gamers can get back to gaming, please. I just want to use my Index at 144hz ffs. Is that too much to ask?

Ethereum and many of your newer than BitCoin cryptos are designed to the ASIC resistant, people have actually being trying to make an Ethereum ASIC, but the algorithm is purposely built to make designing such a system extremely difficult. If they could build ASICs for them, they would have, just like they have done for BitCoin.

Edit: Fixed typo.

 

[InvalidError]

Ethereum and many of your newer than BitCoin cryptos are designed to the ASIC resistant, people have actually being trying to make an Ethereum ASIC, but the algorithm is purposely built to make designing such a system extremely difficult. If they could build ASICs for them, they would have, just like they have done for BitCoin.

Building ASICs for ETH is trivial. The actual problem is that since ETH has random RAM access pattern, RAM bandwidth and latency are the bottlenecks and because of that, ASICs don't provide much benefit over GPU-mining so the R&D cost overhead to go down the ASIC route isn't worth it.

BTC on the other hand is almost pure compute with memory requirements that can be accommodated by small SRAM buffers, so BTC ASICs scale with however many hardware hashers you can cram in whatever silicon you can get and achieve efficiency that GPUs cannot come anywhere close to.

 

[cAZpur426]

Can't manufactors just develop a GPU that is made for mining, like 10 cards or more in strength with a massice PCI-e slot. Way too big in size to fit into a standard gaming rig. Give them earth movers, so we can still purchase the shovels. Dig what I'm saying ?

 

[blacknemesist]

Can't manufactors just develop a GPU that is made for mining, like 10 cards or more in strength with a massice PCI-e slot. Way too big in size to fit into a standard gaming rig. Give them earth movers, so we can still purchase the shovels. Dig what I'm saying ?

Well the problem with that is that crypto-crappers will still buy other single, double or 2,5 as long as the investment in the gpu is returned with an index of confidence that is acceptable. The only way right now to prevent cryptos from getting gaming stuff is to solder everything to the MB and actually have the GPU properly locked by the bios and design a similar handshake between the MB and GPU so no instructions reach the GPU that are considered mining.
Truth is that nvidia just wants to sell and retailers and everyone is the pipeline from manufacturer to the end-client don't care who will use it as long as they get to jackup prices and still not have enough supply for the demand.
You are safer buying a PS5 or XBOX or join the nvidia now program at least until this BS continues.