How much you can earn by mining GeForce RTX 3080

As soon as Jen-Sun Huang or Lisa Su announce a new line of video cards, miners are excited about the new “king of mining” and killer of ASICs. Today we will talk about another tech marvel from Nvidia RTX 3080. Last year mining on this video card brought quite high profit, and unhappy gamers were very worried about the price hike. In their opinion, the root of all evil is mining. Card 3080, so coveted and coveted by the gamer, could be captured by evil gnomes and perished in crypto mines. “Going on a Crusade. A good miner is a dead miner,” they yelled on every website. To support concerned gamers, Nvidia even began to release RTX 30th line graphics adapters with a built-in limiter of mining performance (their marking has the prefix LHR).

People’s craftsmen quickly found several solutions to this problem. And by the middle of 2022 the market was under the bears’ control, and the hype demand for mining cards fell. However, even after the value of crypto-assets fell, sellers are in no hurry to rewrite the price tags of computer components. Maybe they are right in their own way, but still the main criterion for pricing policy is always human greed. But never mind, we are not talking about that now, but about green GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card and its effectiveness in mining cryptocurrencies.

RTX 3080 graphics card specifications

Let’s first look at the technical parameters of the RTX 3080 GPU to understand why Jen-Sun Huang and company are charging us so much money. At the same time let’s compare RTX 3080Ti, RTX 3080 and RTX 3080 LRH models.

To compare this line of graphics cards with their predecessors now makes absolutely no sense. Within the last year Ampere graphics adapters showed their complete superiority over the cards of the 20th line with Turing architecture. True, following that, green released specialized video adapters for mining 30HX and 40HX based on Turing, but that’s another story.

Name	GeForce RTX 3080	GeForce RTX 3080 Ti	GeForce RTX 3080 LHR
Core	GA102	GA102	GA102
Process (nm)	8	8	8
Transistors (millions)	28300	28300	28300
Core frequency, MHz	1440-1710	1 365/1 665	1 260/1 890
Shader Block Frequency, MHz	1440-1710	1 365/1 665	1 260/1 890
Shader blocks	8704	10420	8960
TMU	272	320	280
ROP	96	112	112
Memory frequency (DDR), MHz	1188 (19000)	1188 (19000)	1188 (19000)
Memory bus	320-bit	320-bit	320-bit
Memory type	GDDR6X	GDDR6X	GDDR6X
Memory capacity	10240	12 288	12 288
GSP, GB/s	760	912	912
Shaders Model	6.5	6.6	6.6
Fill Rate, Mpix/s	164200	34099	33869
DirectX	12 (12_2)	12 (12_2)	12 (12_2)
Interface	PCI-E 4.0	PCI-E 4.0	PCI-E 4.0
Power ( W)	320	350	390
Price, rubles	90 499	111 999	104 99

The characteristics, of course, are impressive. It is clear that the employees of Nvidia wanted to surprise their customers and they succeeded. The prices of graphics cards are current as of 06.07.2022 on https://www.dns-shop.ru/catalog/17a89aab16404e77/videokarty/.

Which is better, GeForce RTX 3080/3080Ti or 3080 LHR

Judging by the data from the table, there is no fundamental difference between these devices. Regular 3080 without Ti prefix, of course, brings a little less profit, but also costs less. Graphical adapters with hash rate limiter (LHR) initially gave 65% of hash rate of the usual card of this model on ether, which seemed to reliably insure them from getting into a mining farm. But soon miners with partial hashrate unlocking appeared.

Then the developers of crypto mining utilities figured out how to mine two coins at once on such cards, for example, ETH+RVN. Finally, there appeared mining software, which can completely solve the problem of hash rate limitation. One of the first to implement this option was Nicehash service in its Quick-miner, but it did not cope with all models.

Then came Gminer with -lhr mode. Download the latest version at https://github.com/develsoftware/GMinerRelease/releases. The card with the prefix LHR is suitable for mining, but if you have a choice, it is better to take a regular model to have less trouble with the settings.

As for the choice between the RTX 3080 and 3080Ti, the payback period of both cards is about the same, so you decide which one to buy

Test RTX 3080 in mining on different algorithms

As they write about RTX 3080 on miningclub.info forum: “Only two Kolek have these cards, the rest were bought up in bulk by Chinese miners“. So we will trust what the happy owners of the new “kings of mining” published.

The RTX 3080 Ti accelerates to 120 Mh/s on air, and the RTX 3080 can deliver 100 Mh/s. NVIDIA Geforce RTX 30 Lite Hash Rate cards with skillful tuning produce almost the same results.

During the cryptorollies they brought solid profits, but alas, that’s all behind us now. The 3080 cards are really the kings of mining. Only flagship model RTX 3090 counts hash faster, but it costs much more.

How to overclock an RTX 3080 and reduce power consumption

Well, what kind of overclocking you need for RTX 3080 to achieve 100 Mh/s, because judging by the publications from various sources, at the factory settings the card gave a much more modest results (somewhere around 75-80 Mh/s). According to the author of the article – a forum moderator known under the nickname ValeraTV – you have to set the following parameters for effective mining on RTX 3080:

• Power Limit 75;
• Core Clock 0;
• Memory Clock 1000.

The tests were done with Palit RTX 3080 GamingPro graphics card. RTX 3080 VENTUS X3 managed to overclock up to 103 Mh/s with parameters:

• Power Limit 76;
• Core Clock 0;
• Memory Clock 1500.

The link to the source of the information is https://miningclub.info/threads/vse-rtx-3080-10gb-v-majninge.70017/. It has to be said that not every RTX series GPU can be overclocked that much in memory, with a rather low power limit. But, on the other hand, the graphical adapters from the green ones are good because there is no need to fuss with them when configuring mining, just move a couple of sliders and it’s done.

Of course, for advanced miners can use Nvidiainspector, but with the RTX 3080 this program is probably not friendly yet. You can try to reduce the voltage in MSI Afterburner program with Curve on overclockers.ru assure that they were able to achieve minus 50 W, and reduce the heat output without compromising the performance. We needed to do the following in the OC Scanner application:

• Reduce the core base frequency to 291 MHz.
• Increase the frequency in the selected voltage coordinate (800 mV) by 240 MHz.
• Apply the changed values in MSI Afterburner.

Conclusion, the relevance of investment

Let’s calculate the profit, and decide if it is worth to buy RTX 3080 for mining. As of 06.07.2022, a card with a hash rate of 100 Mn/s on ETH brings $1.74 excluding the outlet.

That is, a mining farm of four RTX 3080 graphics adapters will earn about $4.6 net profit per day. Of course, the result will depend on the cost of electricity in your area and other circumstances. You need to spend about $10,000 to set up such a farm, which means a payback period of over 5 years. This is a very long time. However, the situation may change soon. Cryptocurrencies are volatile and new rise of prices will surely happen. But it is up to you to think it over and weigh it all up.