Ethereum mining hashrates and the core clock frequency of an RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition

Once you found the optimal PL (power limit) value for your GPU when you're mining ethereum, the next step is to tweak the core clock frequency. In this short guide I'm going to shed light on the relationship between the core frequency and the ethereum mining hashrate of a Geforce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition card. Let's start!

For this benchmark I used the results I obtained in "Profiling RTX 3080 Ti for mining ethereum" where I deduced that the optimal PL value for this card is at 260W. So I limit the amount of electric power drawn by the card from the wall with the following command:

And now we can proceed to lock the core clock frequency of the card. I wanted to scan from 400Mhz to 1500Mhz and see how the ethereum mining hashrate varies with changing core frequency. For this purpose I used the following command:

And then slowly increased the core frequency from 400Mhz to 1500Mhz to find the optimal value to supplement the best PL (260W) setting.

Above are average values of the ethereum mining hashrate using t-rex miner for 90 seconds. We see that locking the core frequency has a significant effect on the mining performance. You can set very low values, but then you'd end up getting very low hashrates. I think the meaningful core frequency range starts at around 1000Mhz and it hardly changes when you increase it all the way up to 1500Mhz. Also note that mining performance is affected by the LHR lock. If this switches on more frequently, you get lower hashrates, therefore finding the most optimal parameters on an LHR card is much more difficult, than on a GPU with no LHR.