LHR
Also called: Lite Hash Rate
A limiter NVIDIA introduced in 2021 on some RTX 30 cards to cut their Ethereum hashrate. It no longer has any practical effect today.
LHR stands for Lite Hash Rate. It is a limitation NVIDIA introduced from 2021 on some of its GeForce RTX 30 graphics cards, such as certain RTX 3060, 3070 or 3080 models. The aim was to make these cards less attractive for Ethereum mining, so they would stay available for gamers. The affected cards often carried an LHR label on the box.
The limiter detected the Ethash algorithm being computed and then reduced the hashrate, roughly by half depending on the model. Other uses, such as gaming, video editing or computing, were not affected. Mining software later found ways to recover part of the performance, then NVIDIA removed the limitation from its drivers in 2022. Above all, Ethereum switched to proof of stake in September 2022 and can no longer be mined at all.
Today, the LHR label hardly matters to a buyer. It still appears in listings for used cards. With a recent driver, an LHR card behaves essentially like a standard card, whether for the algorithms still mined on GPUs or for artificial intelligence, where what matters most is the amount of VRAM and the architecture generation.
Our GPU profitability page explains how to assess a graphics card for mining, with no promise of results.