Since Nvidia has no plans to produce a Founders Edition version with an Ethereum hash rate limiter, the new Lite Hash Rate Nvidia graphics cards will be available for the GeForce RTX 3080, RTX 3070, and RTX 3060 Ti GPUs only in third-party versions.

The Green Team announced today via a blog post that all new RTX 3080, 3070, and 3060 Ti cards shipping at the end of May will intentionally halve the cards' Ethereum mining performance when Ethereum's Dagger Hashimoto algorithm is detected The new RTX 3080, 3070 and 3060 Ti cards will feature a limiter that intentionally halves the card's Ethereum mining performance when Ethereum's Dagger Hashimoto algorithm is detected. The limiter was first introduced when the RTX 3060 was released, and after a misreleased drive rendered it useless, new drivers suggest that Nvidia will re-enable the limiter on all products shipping starting mid-May.

The new Lite Hash Rate (LHR) series GPUs will be designated as such by Nvidia's graphics card partners and will have the LHR identifier on retailers and on the box itself, as Nvidia did not specifically mention the RTX 3060 in this release, this appears to apply only to cards originally sold without a limiter.

And the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti boxes we have seen in various leaks make no mention of the LHR series branding. However, it appears that the original three RTX 30 series Founders Edition cards are not going to get the LHR treatment either.

"The Founders Edition is a limited production graphics card sold at MSRP," Nvidia told us this afternoon.

This could effectively mean that the RTX 3080, 3070, and RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition cards are completely discontinued and unlikely to return. However, given the recent rumors that have been swirling around the RTX 30 series in anticipation of a 2021 refresh, and the fact that they have been as scarce as hen's dentures since their launch, it really doesn't seem like a big miss. [As long as that dual-axis fan design gets a new spin with the RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition, etc., I'll still be happy.