Driver that promised faster Ethereum mining for Nvidia GPUs is riddled with viruses

Nvidia and AMD have made changes to gaming GPU stacks in an effort to make them less attractive to crypto miners, including the release of GPU Models for Mining And the Creating entry-level GPUs with specs that aren’t good enough for mining. One of the most important changes came in mid-2021, when Nvidia has released “Lite Hash Rate” (LHR) versions of its RTX 3000 series GPUs This halved their performance when mining Ethereum or similar coins but did not affect gaming performance.

Crypto miners have attempted to circumvent LHR restrictions in a number of ways since then, including using Non-LHR drivers leaked by Nvidia (Oops!) and Update BIOSes from 3090 Series Cards to 3080 Series Cards To raise the hash rate limit. And earlier this week, a hacker named Sergey released “Nvidia RTX LHR v2 Unlocker” that promised to remove hash rate limits on most Nvidia cards using a suite of BIOS updates and specially modified drivers.

To no one’s surprise, novice drivers with performance promises are too good to be true. It turned out to be full of viruses. that comprehensive report It shows that the software package modifies Windows Powershell policies, deletes and creates new files in system directories, and causes abnormal CPU usage, among other things.

I wouldn’t say there is absolutely no reason to install a modified driver on your computer – sometimes these drivers are the best way to get older hardware to work in newer versions of Windows. Other times, as with this famous AMD Driver Pack for Macs with Boot CampIt’s the best way to get consistent driver updates with the latest fixes and performance improvements.

but you are should Use common sense when downloading and installing this type of software. If obscure drivers from a previously unknown third party promise to fix a magical solution to a problem that the entire crypto-mining community hasn’t been able to figure out, you probably shouldn’t install it.