How to 100% Unlock LHR on Nvidia RTX GPUs (HiveOS)

You heard that right. You can nearly double your hashrate with minimal effort, and increase efficiency. Just download a miner, it’s that easy. This quick guide is meant to get you mining ASAP.

NOTE: See this if you have a LHRv3 (3050 and 3080 12GB) GPU. Not 100% unlocked, but close enough.

Wait, what?

On May 7, NiceHash announced they have unlocked LHR cards with their own QuickMiner software. While nobody except them knows how, it’s very likely that the NVIDIA Lapsus$ hack and NVIDIA’s leaked source code helped them reverse-engineer a bypass. They haven’t said anything on the matter, but that’s the most likely explanation.

However, the QuickMiner software is only available on Windows, and most miners prefer Linux because it is more stable, customizable, and better for overclocking. On May 8, NBMiner released their LHR bypass, and it is available for both Windows and Linux.

On May 11, T-Rex and GMiner also added support for full unlocking.

Currently, T-Rex is the most stable miner right now with the best support for LHR unlocking, but this is likely to even out over time.

Install without HiveOS

Just visit the NBMiner Download Page and download either a .tgz or .zip file, according to which OS you mine on. That’s it.

Install for HiveOS

HiveOS already has built-in support for the unlocked NBMiner and T-Rex bypass. Currently, NBMiner is more stable, but T-Rex will become stable within a few days.

First, update your Nvidia drivers to at least 510. You can visit the website or run nvidia-driver-update. Downloading from NVIDIA is much faster, so I recommend that. Then just run nvidia-driver-update DRIVER_YOU_DOWNLOADED.run, and HiveOS will take care of the rest.

Once you’re all done with that, log into your web interface and run a flight sheet with NBMiner or T-Rex. Launch it, and watch your hash rate rise. Make sure HiveOS is up to date, too.

It’s that easy! You should now experience much higher hash rates and efficiency. This article will be updated as more mining tools gain LHR bypasses. Personally, my favorite is T-Rex miner, but I’m happy as long as I get higher hash rates.

LHRv3

NBMiner 41.4 adds support for 90% unlocking LHRv3 cards. All you need to do is create an NBMiner flight sheet, launch it, and then run the following command:

curl -s https://randomblock1.com/assets/scripts/install-nbminer.sh | bash

You should join NBMiner’s discord to try out new beta releases that may improve stability and speed.

Results

Before I applied the NBMiner LHR bypass, I had approximately 30 MH/s on my RTX 3070. After the LHR bypass, it went up to 52 MH/s, and that was all before applying any overclocking. With a full overclock (1200/3700/120 core/memory/power) and the LHR bypass, I got 64 MH/s at 120 W with an efficiency of 550 kH/w. It’s absolutely incredible. At current ETH price of $2100 and $0.30 of electricity cost, I gain a net profit of $1.40 per day. In only about a year and a half, my GPU will pay for itself!

The Future

While this is great and all, Eth 2.0 is coming quite soon, and it will switch ETH from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. So if you mine Ethereum for a living, I wouldn’t go out and buy LHR cards. Unless you want to mine some other coin like Conflux that won’t necessarily be affected by the switch to Ethereum 2.0.

Additionally, as more people download and use the LHR bypass, the ETH Network difficulty will probably increase, meaning you’ll earn less per hash. That shouldn’t be too much of a concern, though, because more hashes still means more shares.