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Comment by smiley1437 | Hacker News Reader

From what I've read, the card detects if it has been continuously mining for 30 minutes then throttles itself.

GP's question was about _how_ it detects it has been mining. Does it have a list of processes or executable names of popular mining software? Does it perform some kind of heuristic and detect if the code it is about to execute corresponds to a hashing algorithm? I don't know the answer, I hope someone can explain it to me and GP.

nVidia has been deliberately vague about exactly what they are detecting because it would make it easy for miners to develop a workaround.

That said, Anandtech wrote about it briefly recently:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16648/nvidia-updates-geforce-...

They surmise that there is hardware-enforcement of BIOS\Drivers via some blown eFuses.

Also they imply that nVidia does multiple checks such as whether it's running on a PCIe x1 bus (gamers would typically use x4 or more) and whether it's hooked up to a monitor. It's likely they check for other things too but they would keep it on the down-low.

I've seen HDMI plugs listed on eBay which supposedly "double the hash rate" on 3060. I figured it was some kind of scam but didn't know they were throttled.

I'm curious about how this is implemented.

I'm also somewhat skeptical about GPU makers doing this for compute in general.

Going to be fun to see cases of false positives. "Help! My FPS drops 75% after running game for 30 minutes!"

Those games are using a lot more of the gpu than just the compute functionality.

Has anyone found out if Hashcat is impacted on the cards that have this already (3060)?

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