Since LHR was introduced, there have been many attempts to work around it. The technology was meant to discourage miners from buying graphics cards made for gaming, but earlier NBMiner and QuickMiner updates already allowed crypto miners to regain a large part of the hash rate on GeForce RTX 30 series cards.
NiceHash announced that QuickMiner, through its Excavator miner, could fully unlock NVIDIA LHR cards. According to the company, that meant users of LHR cards could get more mining performance from their hardware than with other mining software at the time.
With the mining craze cooling down, NiceHash released an update for QuickMiner, which uses the Daggerhashimoto algorithm for mining Ethereum. Earlier versions had already unlocked around 70 to 80 percent of the hashrate. The new update claimed to reach 100 percent, meaning an RTX 3080 and RTX 3080 LHR could produce the same hash rate despite the latter being marked as a Lite Hash Rate variant.
Every NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 series card aside, the RTX 30 range received the LHR treatment. At the same time, mining was no longer as profitable as it had been a year earlier. Cards such as the RTX 3090 Ti produced around 125 to 130 MH/s, translating to roughly four to five euros per day, before electricity costs. Even with lower card prices, investing in new mining hardware looked much less attractive.
Calling NVIDIA's LHR attempt a complete failure would be too simple. It did push retailers and distributors to charge more for non-LHR cards, but it also initially discouraged some miners from buying LHR gaming cards. In the end, though, with mining cooling off and GPUs returning to stock, LHR looked like a feature whose time had passed.
