A few days ago, NVIDIA announced its GeForce RTX 30 LHR series graphics cards which feature brand new Ampere GPUs with hash rate limitations in cryptocurrency mining. Well, it looks like NVIDIA will only be offering these chips through its partner cards and won't be offered on its FE (Founders Edition) variants.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Founders Edition Graphics Cards Won't Receive LHR Variants
According to a statement provided to PCGamer, NVIDIA's spokesperson said that the GeForce RTX 30 Founders Edition graphics cards are a limited product that is designed to be sold at MSRP & as such, they don't have any plans to make LHR versions of it.
"Founders Edition is a limited production graphics card sold at MSRP," Nvidia told us this afternoon, "and at this point we don’t have plans to make versions with LHR."
Currently, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 LHR series graphics cards have received four variants, the RTX 3080, RTX 3070, RTX 3060 Ti, and RTX 3060. The upcoming GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, RTX 3070 Ti, and the GeForce RTX 3050 TI are also going to feature crypto mining limitations. The GeForce RTX 3090 hasn't been listed by any manufacturer so we are unsure if the flagship variant will receive an LHR variant.
PCGamer speculates that this might be the beginning of the end for NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30 FE or Founders Edition lineup as the company ships more GPUs to its partners to produce LHR variants for gamers. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Founders Edition graphics cards are great designs but they are also just as hard to get hands-on as the partner variants and most of these cards are gobbled up by scalpers and put on 3rd party resale sites such as eBay where they end up being listed with obnoxious prices. With that said, not all GeForce RTX 30 Founders Edition cards will be EOL'd as the RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti are still coming early next month and will introduce the FE cooler on board them.
